The biggest and most important achievements in science and art happened before the existence of copyright and patent laws.

To tell people that they cannot freely share the ideas of another person for one hundred years...it just seems to fly in the face of advancement. People act as if not paying money to someone for a hundred years will make art and music disappear.

If 14 years was considered an adequate amount of time to capitalize on an idea back then, before the days of speedy digital distribution (and speedy analog distribution!), why is it so long now?

The thing is I want my computer to be open but don't really care about my phone. My computer is a development machine and I am a power user and programmer. But my phone I want to be simple and intuitive so I can instantly do what I want to do with it.

The iPad is the "locked down Mac" that people here are threatening is to come. I see there being dual product lines, the MacBook Pro's, (maybe iMacs and Macbooks), and Mac Pro's. Then there being iPad-like devices, maybe even coming in a laptop-with-touchscreen form of some sort which run an advanced version of iPhone OS. Give this touchscreen clamshell MacBook/iPad hybrid a faster version of the A4 ARM processor in the iPad and it could easily have 15+ hours of battery life in a form factor the size of the MacBook air. I see this being the second product line available IN ADDITION to the MacBook Pro's.

As someone else said both newbies and power users use OS X. I see Apple differentiating their lines and keeping OS X for their power users/content creators and introducing an iPad-like line of computers for the newbie croud. (lets face it, if Apple made a cheap 3g MacBook Air form factor device running a souped up iPhone OS (adding say printing capabilities, etc.), there are soo many people I could recommend this to (my mom, grandma, etc.)

To be fair, you can get motherboards for many common arcade games for less than $100, because people have stacks and racks of them. PROM burners (which also function as readers) are often available under $100. So for around the price of Neo-Geo games, you could have legal license to arcade ROMs. Keep the ROMs in boxes and throw away the motherboards to save space. It's still pretty spendy in most cases, but I suppose some people might be willing to pay.

Again, you are citing "stuff somebody did long long ago" in order to support your "USA is #1" mantra, blithely ignoring the fact that this whole thread is about current events, namely the retirement of the space shuttle (and the implied loss of technological capability).

I'm getting the strong impression we aren't even on the same page here. You seem to define "technological leadership" in terms of "we have outpatented the rest of the world, now we can sit back and rake in the money".

How about a reality check:

• you need to import "hi tech" products because there are no factories left in your country
• newer, better technologies are suppressed because they would reduce the profitability of "old" technology (Hollywood, Detroit, ...)
• your education system fails to promote scientific thought (or even promotes the opposite, wherever the religious right manages to influence the curriculum).
• substatial parts of your national infrastructure (power grids, factories, mines, bridges, power plants) are decrepit from age. The owners are happy to rake in any profit, but once the sh*t hits the fan it is the taxpayer/the former employees who are left holding the bag.

Of course, none of these "local problems" matter to the people "owning" everything. Too bad for the rest of us though.

if you mean the first mammal cloned: British scientists?

NOT in the US. Big Pharma makes loads of money treating AIDS. A vaccine would destroy that lucrative market.

In the US. And while the HGP (funded by taxpayer money) did not patent the resulting data, other people (Celera) did. After a short bubble, progress in the field of Biotechnology is now at a standstill due blanket patenting. (well, if you listen to the other side, it is at a standstill because patent profits are in danger)

Apropos "patenting genes": ACLU: Breast Cancer gene patents ruled invalid covered on 60 minutes
One thing not mentioned in the CBS coverage is the fact that Myriad's monopoly on BRCA testing also blocks any independent verification of their results. Given that their testing method is based on genetic data from (a few?) white caucasian females, how can they be sure the results also apply to women from other gentic origins? What if -after the patents have expired- new research shows that the results were wrong? Will the women whose breasts and ovaries were needlessly removed get their missing organs back?

The iPhone is a nice product, but there is ZERO new technology in it (Apple's patent portfolio notwithstanding).

OS have been relegated to commodity by now. (and, contrary to Microsoft Advertising, there has been actually very litte technological advance in that field.)

SCO called. They want their #1 FUD meme back.

"originally designed and conceived": ages ago. Today most of that stuff is imported.

if by "us" you mean "the USA":

• automobile: Japan & Europe (GM could not afford to lose the european R&D labs)
• consumer electronics: Japan,Korea
• commodity hardware: Taiwan,Korea
• space technology: Russia,China,India,....
• nuclear power: Europe,Japan

The US might have the lead on atomic bombs, stealth fighters and Aircraft carriers, but -given the geopolitical situation- all of these are white elephants.

That was 40 years ago.

No (sane) country "respects" US patents unless forced by military or economic pressure. The US patent system (that had originally been introduced to protect inventors) has been completely subverted into legalized racketeering.

BTW: the patent mess is just a symptom of the real problem: big money has long since abandoned the idea of "making stuff" (i.e. creating value through work) in favor of "selling licenses" (i.e. collecting monopoly rent on imaginary property).

I thought the previous story said the new Cisco router was only 3 times faster than the previous model. Hardly game changing if so. Further as the upgrade cost will probably be on par to upgrading from a Saturn 5 rocket to the Space Shuttle I doubt every one will jump on it at once.

Why is it BS to turn down the radio? Because it's only a small percentage decrease? Newsflash: any decrease helps. I don't understand this general derision that is specific to Americans when the topic turns to conservation. Yes, one little change by itself won't change the world, but then again, nothing will to that. Instead, it will be a combination of lots of small, little things. Maybe that's the reason: Americans are singularly fascinated by the one big thing - everything has to be historic, unique; a silver bullet in every box of Cheerios....

Fallout 3 from Bethesda had Windows Live for Games, which is the biggest pile of smouldering DRM turd I have ever been unfortunate enough to experience.

My ISP likes to rate limit people (i.e. drop packets) during peak times, and this entirely killed Steam/Windows Live logins. Steam behaves itself 99% of the time offline, but Windows Live was shit - I had to wait several days before I could actually create my initial account. There was an offline function after initial setup, but it was not always reliable (eg if you had a network connection, but didnt want to use it).

Oh, and even worse - if at any time Windows Live for games decides that an update is available, you cannot skip it whatsoever and cannot play YOUR GAMES THAT YOU OWN at all until it has performed the update. So you get a sniff of network access somewhere (airport wifi) and there's an update available that you dont get to finish too bad, you cannot play your games anymore.

your the one claiming god exists, it's up to you to prove his existence. that's how it works, you make the claim, you provide the proof. otherwise i can just say "aliens stole my lunch money", and claim victory when you fail to prove me wrong.

there's nothing setting god apart from a fairy tale in the eyes of someone demanding proof of his existence, the both lack any physical evidence.

Quite relevant to this discussion, I think would be that after prohibition ended (1933) the vast majority of organized crime *did* indeed lose all their black-market booze money, though there were still *plenty* of existing illegal activities for them to continue to capitalize on (prostitution, existing blatantly racist drug laws, e.g. the Harrison Act from 1914), and some new ones which conveniently materialized,only 5 years later, for instance: the Marijuana Tax Act)

Obviously we can't legalize actual violent crimes or bribing/blackmailing lawmakers, that organized criminals profit from. Though legalizing and regulating simple possession and sale of a freaking dried plant or some powder, would likely free up law enforcement resources to deal with those kinds of things. Again, one could argue that that's not a certainty, but what is?

We'll never find out *for sure* if "legalizing everything" will *drastically* reduce violent crime, unless we do it (it couldn't be more of a disaster than prohibition if that experiment failed) though, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that it wouldn't reduce violent crime at all, it's really pretty simple to see that it would.

The important question is: would legalizing the drugs cause more harm than the increased violence that their prohibition causes (directly and indirectly)?

I suppose that's a complex question, but I've never seen *anyone* present hard evidence that it would. In fact the evidence is growing from countries like Switzerland, Holland and even the UK -- that drug legalization/decriminalization programs do indeed have a net positive benefit to a society currently undergoing drug prohibition, especially when coupled with a good public health program for treating addiction, even though, seemingly there are some people that don't seem to be able to stop their self-abusive behavior. But if they are getting their drugs from a clinic, for free even, they're probably not out knocking over a liquor store.

Some of the same people who say that there's no climate change because it snowed last week would say that "the science isn't in" on this one too, and while they may have a point (albeit possibly for the wrong reasons) -- sometimes you have to do something, even with "limited data", simply because it's the right thing to do, even with risk of failure, or risk of making things worse.

Since hey, if it doesn't reduce violent crime, or generates millions of new addicts (yeah, right), then launch the war on drugs "reloaded" or whatever.

With alcohol people realized after only a decade that it wasn't helping (or maybe more because a few too many senators and their buddies got caught drinking.)

After over 70 years of racist, poorly-conceived reactionary drug policy, it's time to do something to change it. I'd suggest that "legalizing everything" would be less harmful than what we have now, in almost every way -- but ideally there would probably be some kind of regulation, which is something that would require mature, reasonably smart people, with the authority to enact law to sit down and discuss the issues and listen to people who have actually already studied and thought about the issues -- I wonder how long it'll be before the US has that.

It’s really an entirely different situation.

You have physical access to the car. You don’t have physical access to a computer system. If you had physical access to the computer, you could do anything... disassemble it, reverse-engineer it, patch it, and make it do whatever you want.

You don’t. You have a network connection over which you can send bytes. Ones and zeros. The computer on the other end had damn sure better be designed in such a way that no sequence of ones and zeros can damage it or get it to reveal data that shouldn’t have been available to me. If I come into your building and smash the box with a sledgehammer, then no... there is no way your software could have foreseen that “input”. But ones and zeros coming in by the normal input path? Absolutely.

If you still require a car analogy, imagine the push-button door locks. Suppose that, by punching a particular sequence of numbers on the lock, I can reprogram the braking system to completely fail as soon as you get up to 60 MPH. Now did the designer fuck up? You bet your ass.

This should never happen, and the person who designed it is a bleeding moron:
http://mcckc.edu/searchResults.asp?cx=015941728899689753552%3Amvkfqavgtf4&ie=UTF-8&cof=FORID%3A11&q=%3E%3C%2Ftitle%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert%28document.cookie%29%3B%3C%2Fscript%3E%3C!&sa.x=0&sa.y=0#242
View the source to see where the code fucks up. Obviously it’s an issue of not escaping the input.

I'm not a software engineer, and I use a Windows machine approximately 80% of the time... And I don't like the way Windows hides stuff.

Install a piece of software under Windows, and there's really no telling where it goes. Sure, most of the code will live somewhere in the Program Files directory... But you'll wind up with some DLLs scattered all over the drive, and all sorts of registry entries. Un-install the software and it'll likely leave bits behind. Try to re-install again and you may find yourself with all sorts of odd errors.

I don't know how many times I've had to manually comb through the registry to clean out left-behind bits of antivirus software that didn't get cleanly removed.

There's generally no good way to make a backup of your settings before messing with something. Under Linux everything is basically a text file... So I can make a backup of that text file and revert to it if I have to. Under Windows... Well, I suppose I could probably make a backup of the registry... Unless the setting is actually stored in a file somewhere else - like in Local Settings or Application Data or something like that.

And if I screw something up in Linux it's generally a matter of making a change to a config file that is more-or-less human-readable. Under Windows it's a matter of finding the right checkbox in the right window - which isn't necessarily going to be available if you've borked your machine badly enough that you've had to slave the drive.

it isn't supposed to benefit the consumer. It's supposed to benefit their bottom line. Which in the long run, benefits the people who want a better, more diverse range of games to play.

It's the same thinking as paywalls on news websites - we aren't making enough money now, even though we have x customers. If we add a paywall, we'll only have 0.y *x customers, but at least we'll have enough money to stay in business and provide them content. The users who pay may even get a better experience this way if they make more money doing it.

Why would customers be happy about it? Well if I'm paying for a game, and getting the same experience as someone who pirated it, and they represent 19/20 players, and then they start to add DRM which gimps the game to keep those 19/20 people out (and still doesn't work) I'm not exactly feeling like their strategy is pro customer. Now though, they're saying things like 'free DLC when you preorder' well really that means you're paying $60 for the DLC and the the game is free because you could have pirated it and just had to buy the DLC, but at least I feel like I'm not stealing their stuff, and I'm getting something out of paying money. UBIsofts system is bad because it punishes you for having bought their product. The EA system of DLC is good because it rewards you for paying for the game, but if you won't pay for the game or DLC elements of it, you're not getting the same experience as someone who does. The Sony thing is half and half, they're just advertising it badly, not that I can think of a better way. Buy our product, get free multiplayer, don't buy our product, pay for multiplayer! But then I suppose they have the problems as EA and their DLC - you can still get the rest of the game for free, or a lot less used/pirated.