It seems to me that if an independent research lab can invent the building blocks of the modern PC and not profit from it, than clearly a large corporation with limitless resources and pressured by a competitive market can innovate without the need of a patent system. The innovation was "stolen" by the competition ? Great, work on getting it cheaper, or work on the next big thing, without a comfy patent that can neuter the competition. So how about we ditch this patent system altogether ?

I'm not saying Xerox PARC does not deserve to profit from it's creations - they certainly deserve it much more than the patent trolls. I'm saying that if they XP can sustain a high level of innovation without proportional compensation, that's a clear argument against the need for profitable patents as a method for of stimulating innovation. The economic cost of the patent system is higher than the value it delivers through innovation: XP was able to deliver phenomenal results with limited compensation.

One one hand profitable patents are not necessary for innovation as explained above, and on the other hand patents are frequently harmful to innovation: patent trolls, preventing the competition from building on your invention etc.

Are you so sure about the bolded part ? Assuming the majority of stock holders agree with issuing new shares, the proceeds of selling those shares belong to the company, so all stock holders gain by the same amount they are loosing through share dilution. Sure, the management can decide to use the cash for rewarding itself with higher bonuses to compensate the stock loss; however I can't see they can discriminate against existing stock holders.

On the other hand, we're talking about stock options; if the contract says the employees have the option to buy 1000 shares at 1$ each, and the stock price has jumped to 500$ in the meantime, then yes, issuing 500x more stock is the legal and accepted way to "solve the problem". I assume the contracts of these Zynga employees says a different thing.

They are founded by right-holders and have an arsenal of favorable laws. No surprise they can get results.

There's nothing wrong with the sandboxing model per se. It's probably the only way to make our computers more secure. That Apple is moving in that direction should not be surprising: they make idiot-ready software (also known as good software), and you can't really have security and idiot friendliness without a trusted 3rd party to sort out the nitty-gritty details.

It should also be unsurprising that Apple moves to an authoritarian model where it and it alone can act as the trusted 3rd party. Almost everything Apple does is to maximize clout and control over the product environment. Apple is a control freak: it's profitable and risky, it almost got them killed when the PC revolution happened.

I would much rather like to see a sandbox where multiple private companies publish application profiles and the consumer choice is maximized; that's a nice role for the AV companies to play, move from a blacklist to a whitelist model. Should such a company turn into Big Brother, limit the consumer choice and push it's own interests, the consumers can easily move to a different "security provider".

There's no need for name calling, especially since you missed my entire point. What I'm saying is that fucking piece of paper serves as a differentiator in an environment low on jobs; if companies refuse to segregate on diplomas they will start to pick their candidates on eye colour or via lottery, they need some method to match a small number of jobs to a much large number of applicants.
So the problem is the low number of jobs available on the market, and those who are still creating jobs should in no way be blamed for being picky. You don't need that paper because the company requires it, you need it because every kid on the block already has it.
Incidentally, I have 3 years of extra education on you; an utter waste of time and resources from the perspective of learning useful stuff and developing skills.

Sure you can come back, back to the person who invested 100.000$ in your career. He will eventually wisen up or go bankrupt, stopping the flow of money fuelling the dubious degree bubble. In any case, I don't care, it's strictly between you and your lender, free people of the planet Earth.

Wait a minute now - you got your money freshly printed from the Fed via a student programme underwritten by ME, the taxpayer ? Well then, that should stop. End all federal programs intended to make tuition "affordable" and you will defuse the education bubble.

Not at all. They are cherry picking the best that the labour market has to offer in an oversupply environment. And if experienced PhDs want to be office clerks, it's certainly against the corporation's best interest to turn them down.

So the corporations are not to blame if you and one million other kids wasted your life on an expensive degree, only to find there is not enough demand for it. You get what you pay for, namely an expensive degree. You didn't expect so many other kids would follow the same kamikaze career path ? Bad for you.

It seems so often in the scientific world that two teams come to make the same discovery simultaneously. More often than not the next logical step in a field is dictated by the global advancement in that and other fields, and not the individual genius of the author. Many times ideas are ripe for the picking, if you are one of the very smart working on them. Hence the large number of joint discoveries or teams that supplement each other's results despite being in competition.

Completely off-topic, but I can't stop from making a parallel with the patent world. I expect this manner of scientific advancement to translate to technical creations too. The basis of the patent system is that rewarding the author will stimulate creativity. But one cannot wonder how many of really smart inventions wouldn't have been invented anyway, or indeed have been invented simultaneously by someone else when their time had come.

In the extreme, it's clear that a system that devotes a large proportion of the resources of society to reward the inventors in one that stimulates creativity. However that stimulus is not without his costs. The large legal ecosystem surrounding the patent system is a high consumer of those resources dedicated to inventors. Businesses have to devote important resources to ensure that are not infringing, instead of simply strive to create the best product possible. The exclusivity period is an economic disturbance, the large license fee an inventor might require for his revolutionary invention might not be earned if the same invention would have been made anyway in a year or two from the original filling date. The public key cryptography algos come to mind.

Note that I'm talking about smart, revolutionary patents. I think we can agree that the bulk of patents don't fit that category and cost the society more than they bring. Well, I'm upping the ante and question if even the smart patents really cover their costs for society. Because if most of the smart ones would have been discovered anyway in a year or two, maybe we can get rid of the patent system for good. Sure, some smart ones would remain uninvented even after the 20 years period without the stimulus of a financial prize. But I argue they would be few and far between, their opportunity cost much smaller than what we are collectively spending on the patent system.

They have 34 assorted patents that they are using as an Argumentum Verbosium - Proof by intimidation. They make up hundreds of pages of legalese, there's no way a business can defend itself without spending tens of thousands on patent attorneys to examine those claims and cross-check them against the WiFi standards. Below are the 17 patents asserted against Holiday Inn, have fun. (Talk about "redundant" patents!)

  6,714,559 “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
  7,386,002 “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
  7,535,921 “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
  7,548,553 “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
  5,740,366 “Communication Network Having Plurality Of Bridging Nodes Which Transmit A Beacon To Terminal Nodes In Power Saving State That It Has Messages Awaiting Delivery.”
  5,940,771 “Network Supporting Roaming, Sleeping Terminals.”
  6,374,311 “Communication Network Having A Plurality Of Bridging Nodes Which Transmit A Beacon To Terminal Nodes In Power Saving State That It Has Messages Awaiting Delivery.”
  7,457,646 “Radio Frequency Local Area Network.”
  5,546,397 “High Reliability Access Point For Wireless Local Area Network.”
  5,844,893 “System For Coupling Host Computer Means With Base Transceiver Units On A Local Area Network.”
  6,665,536 “Local Area Network Having Multiple Channel Wireless Access.”
  6,697,415 “Spread Spectrum Transceiver Module Utilizing Multiple Mode Transmission.”
  7,013,138 “Local Area Network Having Multiple Channel Wireless Access.”
  7,710,907 “Local Area Network Having Multiple Channel Wireless Access.”
  7,916,747 “Redundant Radio Frequency Network Having A Roaming Terminal Communication Protocol.”
  7,873,343 “Communication Network Terminal With Sleep Capability.”
  7,536,167 “Network Supporting Roaming, Sleeping Terminals.”

The submitter did not mention infringement and I think the question should be approached in the general "what if I want to host things the US government does not approve of" manner. Things like whistleblowing, gambling, consensual porn illegal in US, "hate" speech, anti-US islamic propaganda, selling patent or trademark infringing stuff (that's not copyright), unregulated financial services, recreational drugs etc. Any of these could easily determine the US authorities to seize your domain - and for each and every one of them we can have a long discussion if it's seizing the domain is a legitimate act.

As for the question itself, I don't think there's an answer. The island nation TLDs (.tv .tk .cx etc.) are usually leased to for-profit US or European corporation that pays a rent to the island government; that corporation will drop you instantly if there's any threat they might see legal issues - they are in it for the profit. Any of the national TLDs are usually just as evil as the US government if you cross them - your only hope is to have different touchy points compared to the US. For example the .ch Swiss TLD was fine for Wikileaks, but it probably not be a good idea for deregulated financial services.

The registrar is fairly important - The Pirate Bay operates for years on a .org TLD with Key Systems GMBH as registrar, a German company. New generic TLDs are set to be available from 2012 - we can only hope to get a .free committed to freedom of speech, but we will probably get another batch of .coms and .bizs totally under ICANNs foot.

The analogy is rock solid - let me rephrase it cars. Suppose you are a car manufacturer who wants to sell more cars. Well, you could do that by offering a free lifetime supply of gas for every purchased car. Pretty soon people will queue up to buy your cars. And it's a good thing !

As I said I think harassment is an issue of form, not content. So you can certainly make harassing death threats, but not all death threats should be harassment. However that does not mean it's protected speech: it's a incitement or confession of illegal behaviour to follow, and of course the law enforcement should pick up the cue.

You should be free to say "I believe Las Vegas deserves to be wiped out by a nuclear bomb because it's a mockery towards God", but you should not be free to publish a newspaper add where you are seeking to buy plutonium.

The definition of harassment as "everything that a person find offensive, however delivered" is what bugs me.

It's perplexing to see in the parent post and it's replies a the failure to differentiate between a physical assault on your property (faeces on lawn) and a purely intellectual endeavour, someone saying things about you online, in the newspaper, etc.

You could argue that some forms of harassment are by their nature an assault on your property, like someone shouting insults through a megaphone in front of your house or defacing you website - no doubt that's antisocial behaviour. But allowing people to comment on a public board is not defacement, it's an invitation for the public to post their thoughts. You are by all means free to censor those thoughts but you have no basis to claim you are harassed by thoughts you don't like.

While it may be easy to spot "trolling" in this particular case, it basically boils down to saying unpopular things that the court finds apprehensible. Trouble is, no matter how unpopular some things are, they still might be right, truth is not decided by vote. And that's why we have freedom of speech ! It's easy to give a huge list of historical examples which would have easily earned you a death sentence a few hundred years ago. In some parts of the world they still do, for example suggestions of religious tolerance in ultra-orthodox theocracies. If I were to post caricatures of Prophet Muhammed on the Iranian govt.'s message board, should I also be jailed or killed ? I'm sure they would find it every bit as apprehensible as this troll here.

To say caricatures of Muhammed are OK but crude humour is not is simply moral relativism, "my truth is better than your truth". You either accept freedom of speech or you don't, there's no way to differentiate a priori "good" speech from "bad" speech. As always, the test case for freedom of speech is not pompous talk about liberty and equality (as this post here); rather, it's the most detested and despicable speech, those words that "clearly" serve no purpose other than insult.

All this is not to say that harassment does not exist. However, harassment is an issue of form not content. "Spreading rumours" is not harassment, is free speech, and the various anti-defamation laws are encroaching on a basic right to hold public opinions about other people. Mail threats or verbal insults are - the recipient is not actively seeking them, and there's little he can do to stop it.

The question is, did the leaked keyset also contained legitimate keys that were distributed with games ? Maybe a mix of:
- keys yet unused
- keys printed on CDs not yet sold
- keys that already in the hands of customers

If that's the case, not only Valve can't penalize those accounts - they need to actually support online game play as advertised, at the very least for keys in the last category, if they can sort them out.

I don't care if it's free, and I don't care if the publisher leaked my key: the bundling of a free game skewed my buying decision and I have the right to play it.

As the GGGP that was moded "troll", I'd say those numbers are clearly skewed towards the economic interests of big pharma. A disease that kills 1 million 3rd worlders each year gets the 4 times more research than baldness ? And that's indicative to the interests of researchers ? Give me a break.
Of course cancer gets allot of resources, it's one of the leading causes of death for rich white people, together with overeating until your arteries clog or your hart pops.

Now I don't expect rich white people to have any moral imperative to use their resources for saving coloured people. That's comunism. The fact of the matter is consumer buying power is behind these research choices, and no westerner cares about malaria. But let's be honest for a fucking moment, and acknowledge that as far as our wallet is concerned, our baldness is more important than some other's guy life.