Firstly, being able to "stand on the shoulders of giants" is good for innovation. Patents often stop that, especially in a fast moving field like computing - having to wait for the patent to expire before you can build upon it is a problem. You may argue that someone who wants to build upon a patented technology should just licence it, but the licence fee may be out of the reach of many inventors. And that's assuming the patent owner is even interested in licensing it - they may well just tell you to bugger off.

Secondly, the constant fear of being sued into oblivion if you happen to accidentally infringe someone's patent is a brake on innovation. It's pretty much impossible to write software that doesn't infringe someone's patent these days, so you're basically relying on not pissing off the wrong people. And giving the existing big players the ability to shut down a new competetor before they even get going is certainly not good for innovation.

The original intention of patents was twofold:
1. give the inventor a limited time to profit from their invention and recoup development costs.
2. provide documentation of the invention so that, after the patent has expired, the public can build their own rather than being at the mercy of the inventor.
I certainly think both of these intents are great. Inventors *should* be able to recoup their development costs; but I don't think that's working these days - big companies ship such volumes that they are going to recoup their costs in short order anyway, and the small inventors simply can't afford to defend themselves, so the patents simply benefit the large companies (whether or not they are innovating) at the detriment to the small inventor. The second of these intents is a good thing too, but modern patents are trash - they are so thick with legalese that they're downright impossible to understand anyway, and the details are so scant that you wouldn't be able to reproduce the invention from the documentation provided in the patent.

So to my mind, the problems with patents currently outweigh the benefits.

No, I create stuff all the time and I think patents are a big problem. The stuff I create probably falls into 2 categories:
1. Stuff that someone else has already patented. And by that I mean I developed it on my own without knowledge of the existing patent, but someone somewhere probably already patented it. Patents are supposed to be novel enough that this should almost never happen, but we all know many modern patents are complete trash and a trained chimp could've come up with the same solution.
2. Stuff that someone else will patent at some point in the future.

Either way, I can't afford to patent all my own inventions, nor can I afford to litigate. So patents aren't helpful at all to me - they only serve to put the brakes on development because its basically impossible to write software without infringing someone's patent these days, so everyone is just living in hope that the patent holder doesn't notice or get pissed off with them. That isn't a healthy way to do things.

Spinning stations need to be large in diameter: the smaller the diameter, the faster you have to spin it, and the coriolis force starts to really screw with the people inside it. Great if you want the astronauts throwing up all the time. So spinning stations have to be big, which means expensive.

The alternative is to tether two stations together, but NASA have a history of serious problems with tethers.

Its not quite the same thing. If you buy a lotto ticket then you have a single change of winning. In the case of dropbox, you have many chances of "winning" (consider how many files dropbox stores).

Of course you're right that a collision is incredibly unlikely, but I don't think your example is especially comparable.

It becomes your problem when you lose all your customers.

This is what I don't get - yes there are rare situations where if your engine dies at the wrong moment you're going to be put in danger, but that isn't the norm. If your engine dies while you're doing 70mph down the motorway, the car doesn't suddenly burst into flames or spin off the road, it just starts slowing down (in fact, exactly like taking your foot off the accellerator does). In 6th gear, my car will go a *looong* way if I turn the engine off at 70mph and don't touch the brakes - certainly plenty of time to cross a couple of lanes and reach the hard shoulder. Even further in neutral.

I would argue that you want to *avoid* using the brakes unnecessarilly - you'd usually get 2 - 3 good "pumps" of the brakes after the engine dies before you lose the assistance so you don't want to waste them. Additionally, if it's safe to do so then leaving your engine in a high gear will keep it spinning and therefore keep your brakes working (at the cost of slowing your car down more quickly.

Anyway, I certainly agree that teaching this stuff when people learn to drive would be a good idea - everyone should know what it's like to drive their car with no power steering or assisted brakes. You're going to have to do that if you ever need a tow anyway.

The problem with "let people make their own decisions" is that it's rarely your own decision. I work 9:00 - 17:30, not because those are the hours I want to work, but because they are the hours that most people work and my customers expect me to be contactable during "normal office hours".

It seems likely to me that the people who had heart attacks after having an hour less sleep were probably going to have a heart attack *anyway* and the shorter night just stressed their body enough to make it happen marginally sooner. So if the clocks hadn't changed, maybe they would've only lasted a couple of days longer.

Similarly, the people who didn't have a heart attack on the day when they got an hour more sleep may well go on to have their heart attack a few days later.

I believe that EU courts have declared CSS to not be "effective copy protection", so it is legally breakable.

However, this new legislation does seem fairly worthless because the "consumer guide" that the government has released says that you still don't have the right to break DRM in order to exercise your new right to copy CDs/DVDs/ebooks/etc.

To be honest, I'm surprised how widely the population has accepted ebooks, given how restrictive the licensing terms and DRM are. For example, if you buy a paper book, you can read it, then your wife can read it, you can lend it to a friend/relative to read, then it can sit on your book shelf for 20 years until your kids read it. All of this stuff has been considered "normal" usage for a book - people expect to be able to do this stuff and it seems reasonable to them. Now compare to an ebook - lets take a Google Play book as an example: you "buy" it and you can read it. Then when your wife wants to read it, she has to buy her own copy. You can't lend it to a friend - they have to buy their own too. In 20 years time, your kids will have to buy their own copies (although I have serious doubts that you will still be able to get at your purchased ebooks by that time anyway). There is no mechanism within Play to let you lend books to friends or family and the licence even prevents you from letting someone else read it on your own tablet. To me, all this seems completely unreasonable and I'm really surprised that everyone else doesn't think so to, given that all this stuff has been accepted practice for hundreds of years. Of course, you can choose to strip the DRM and/or break the licence terms, but to my mind what's the point in paying for the content in the first place if you're going to be forced into breaking the law anyway?

It's not entirely clear what you mean when you say "root exploit" but one interpretation is an exploit that when run as a regular user gives you administrator/root permissions. There have definitely been recent XP privilege escalations exploits for XP recently (e.g. CVE-2013-5065 leverages a bug in NDProxy).

Perhaps you meant "remote exploit" but also last year there was CVE-2013-3175 malformed asynchronous RPC request so another machine can attack your XP machine over the network with no user intervention. See this table of 2013 Windows XP CVE entries for a list of what MS have been patching...

If you are no longer able to keep your OS regularly patched it's no longer safe and you are better off using something else for online activities. Save XP for those appliances that have to use it and can be stringently firewalled/quarantined.

The password was handed over under duress. Contracts signed under duress are legally invalid, so I would think that the implied permission given by the student under duress is also invalid.

There's no evidence that the student thought that what she posted was _private_. However, its reasonable to believe that only the people you've authorised to see to post are going to see the original post (doesn't stop one of those people copying and pasting it elsewhere though). I don't think it's reasonable to expect that someone is going to extract your password under duress to see a facebook post though (and the fact that they had to extract the password clearly shows that the post wasn't public...)

Well that depends. When you sign up to a commercial service then you agree to a contract, which usually includes a privacy policy. And in the case of Facebook, they include privacy controls. It is reasonable to expect the commercial service to comply with the contract to protect your data - and indeed, if they don't then you can sue them for any damages it causes.

Assuming you've given one or more other people permission to see the post, then you can't make any guarantees about what _they_ will do with it - nothing stopping them making a copy of the post and redistributing it (although this may be covered under copyright law). However, that is no different to sending that post to those people in any other way - doing it on facebook makes no difference. If you sent a hand written message to a bunch of people via the postal service, you're in the same boat - nothing stopping one of those people redistributing the message.

However, all of that is irrelevant - the school didn't get to see the post because the student was careless and put it somewhere public, the school got to see it because they performed an illegal search of somewhere the school would not normally have access to. Doesn't matter whether they illegally searched the student's facebook account, bag, home, etc., the result is the same.

If you don't use the hand brake to assist with your hill-starts, you will probably fail the driving test here in the UK. So when you say "it can be used in that fashion", what you really mean is "it should be used in that fashion", given that that is what a professional driving instructor will teach you to do.

Which further reenforces the point that a parking brake is pretty much worthless as an emergency backup for the primary brakes - its purpose is to hold the car stationary while parked and to assist with hill-starts. Furthermore, if your parking brake is not able to provide enough braking force to hold your car on a hill, your car is not roadworthy (it is one of the MoT checks - it is illegal to drive your car on a public road without passing the MoT).

All that said, every car I've driven with manual transmission since the introduction of electronic ignition has been able to hold itself on the clutch with no throttle input on all but the steepest hills, since the ECU will tend to automatically inject more fuel if the revs drop. So even without using the hand brake, I would expect to be able to hill-start without rolling back into the car behind.

I never figured out WTF was wrong with having a hand brake... A recent trip to Canada saw me having to use a torch to actually find the foot operated parking brake every time I needed to operate the damned thing!

ISTR that the idea of cockpit voice recorders was originally rejected because it was seen as an invasion of pilots' privacy. CVRs were eventually accepted after they were equipped with an erase button that the pilot would press at the end of a successful flight (although I assume modern CVRs don't have an erase button, and as it is non-trivial to play them back I guess the pilots aren't too worried these days). I imagine some people would have privacy concerns with being constantly recorded and that recording automatically transmitted to their employer. (But I will agree that it seems completely nuts for a modern digital CVR to be able to record for less time than the plane can fly on a tank of fuel)

Can you not see the difference between a member of the public happenning to see what you're doing while they're going about their own business, vs. you having all your activities recorded, stored indefinitely and automatically analysed?