It's because you want a standard to include the best possible technology, and a lot of that is patented. But most of the time that's fine, because a standard only becomes a standard if everyone accepts it as a standard, and that only happens if licensing conditions are acceptable to the huge majority of players in the market. That's what happened with MP3 and h.264; they are free for small companies, cheap for medium sized companies and relatively cheap for big companies.

And that's the problem here, some guys with patents wanting unacceptable amounts of money. So the expectation is that the potential licensors will say "f*** that, we stay with h.264" and the standard is dead in the water, until these patent holders irrevocably agree to cut down their license fee demands. And make more money by getting a small amount of money from everybody rather than getting a huge amount from nobody.

Total money that could be made by winning a lawsuit against Xiph: Zero. Why would anyone take them to court, when there is no money to be made?

Now if you convinced Netflix, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. to replace all their codecs with Xiph codecs, you would see patent lawsuits rolling in.

What does this have to do with software patents? It's about patents. There is nothing specific to software patents here. You have several patent holders, one set of patent holders who want to license their patents for cheap, and one set of patent holders who want to charge enormous amounts.

Obviously if a family switches from two to one car they have already made 50% of the potential savings, so going from one to zero will save them less.

It's not just the rust. Driving a cold engine causes much more wear and tear than a warmed up engine. If I drive three miles, and then the car takes nine more passengers one after the other and drives each for another three miles, it's not ten times the wear on the engine, because the nine other drive in perfect conditions with a warmed up engine. For the same reason, fuel consumption per mile goes down. Not that much, but the first three miles take twice as much fuel as the last three.

In the morning, instead of brushing your teeth, shaving, combing your hair and walking to the car, you call the car, brush your teeth, shave and comb your hair. And when you leave the house, there's the car waiting on the street, you don't even have to take it out of your drive.

And then there's the question how much that one minute wait is worth to you. Myself I think an attitude like that is quite anal.

Why? Let's start from the beginning: You have a computer, controlling engine and steering by wire. You can easily have a tiny remote control so you can do the steering by wire if the computer fails, or if it gets into a situation that it cannot handle (presumably short term). If the steering by wire fails, you send a pickup truck like you would now in case of a break down. If something goes wrong and there is no qualified driver, you call for help and a qualified driver arrives. These things are so rare that the slight inconvenience doesn't matter.

You suffer from a huge misconception here, thinking that insurance with $10 million limit would have to be ten times more per year than one with a $250k limit. Not at all, as everyone driving in European countries with much higher limits will tell you.

The huge majority of accidents, but also the huge majority of total damage, is paid within the $250k limit. Whenever I had the choice between different limits (say 1 million or 2 million or 10 million Euros), the difference in cost is absolute peanuts.

Of course there may be a difference in the USA, because the amount of insurance cover is always equal to the amount that you get sued for. And again, European countries have very simple measures to prevent that from happening.

Not only park further away, but self driving cars can park closer together. They could park side by side because no driver has to get out, and they could comfortably park four cars in a row; if the first one is needed the other three just drive away for five seconds and immediately go back to the empty row.

It's different by being a _business_ model. There are things you can do privately, but you can't do them as a business. Uber drivers are not "giving someone a lift". They don't pick up people going to the same place that they wanted to go anyway. They specifically make a trip because they are paid to make a trip. They are taxis.

I really hope that Uber gets a jury that decides the company is breaking the law, has no intention to stop breaking the law, and therefore needs to be dissolved. With all the investment money divided up between the taxi drivers affected by their law breaking.

Did Rosa Parks get billions of dollars from investors and then use the money to bribe bus drivers not to accept any white passengers? I don't think so.

We are straight back to phones the size of a house brick. When the iPhone was released with a 3.5 inch screen, everyone thought it was _huge_.

Absolutely misunderstanding what the good judge said. If your server sends information to a hacker without the hacker asking for it, you would have a point. But that doesn't happen (or not very often).