I see this as a brazen shift from public policy matters being handled by the elected government of the people, to policy being determined by corporate entities, and therefore only by the propertied owner.

Which would finally return us to the grand old system of the landed property owner exclusively having a vote.

But this is worse. In a stockholder scenario, those with more property have a proportionally greater vote, rather than an equal vote like the landed property owner model.

So, what we are telling people is re: net neutrality, your government representation vote does not matter. You must buy stock to have a vote on the matter, and your vote is proportional to the amount you can spend on the stock, and the company's stock-issuance policies, for that matter.

This is a bad precedent. Governmental policy decisions should never be handed over to a stockholder vote. Ever. You can forget about American democracy if they are. If this is the result of obstruction in Congress, the obstructionists have won.

fnord fnord fnord

What about snow leopards and lions?

Human, I will commune with the cyber-controller about providing you with a pet cyber-mat. DELETE DELETE. ;^)

Finally, at this late hour, they realize that they do not like freedom of speech, they do not enjoy liberty, that special interests and the unjust exercise of power are harmed or defeated by such blessings. They want the old system back, where the individual could scream into the wind and no one would hear it. Where only large media conglomerates had the coverage, and the privilege, to control "public opinion." They long for the days when "public opinion" was their opinion, and not off-message as it is now.

Well, I have five words for them: Too late. Too damn bad.

Dear antediluvian governments: Enjoy your newly empowered citizenry. You don't get an Arab Spring without this, and you can't control the people at home if you decide to treat us as they did in the Middle East, or Soviet Russia. Good luck with that.

Ugh. Not "silly" enough to fix your funny bone. ;^)

And if you may be a terrorist, or appear to be supporting terrorism in any way, you legally can be detained indefinitely by the military, without trial, according to the NDAA.

SO DON'T STAND SO CLOSE TO THE ATM, YOU TERRORISTS.

I had the same thought. Google is almost, but not quite, evil.

Then I thought of the adorable Pokemon character and slept well.

Just curious, why are folks spelling it the "Straight of Hormuz" instead of the "Strait." Is that a Queen's English spelling? In the US the correct spelling is definitely "strait," as in: "a narrow channel." Also, the linked articles spell it as "strait."

Not meaning to be a pedant here, I'm actually genuinely curious. Either it's a common spelling error or a cultural standards difference, and I was wondering which.

Patent law, by design, has always been a circular firing squad in the tech sector. In any sector really, it's meant to be a last resort against extreme foul play. It is understood that if one company files patent claims against another, there will be reciprocation, eventually grinding your entire industry to a halt. What is concerning in the Microsoft/Android case is that there has to be some fundamental weakness in the profitability of operating software engineering, as a business model, to introduce this sort of behavior. Microsoft is literally cannibalizing its own markets, and its clients. Since MS must know that, it's disturbing to watch them clutch at it to remain profitable, while they figure out what their actual, sustainable business model is going to be.

I imagine they feel justified, because FOSS undermined the profitability of software licensing and copyright monopolies, justifiably or no, and put it squarely into genuine software innovation and quality support services. So they are serving it right back to Stallman, in their book, by going after Android. But the fact is: Microsoft has neither innovation nor good support services any longer, and so they really are forced to eat themselves alive.

I would argue they never had those traits. They started up as Quick-and-Dirty OS, and that's all they've ever been. An expediency driving the ultimate commoditization of software and hardware alike. We all ran it because it was cheap (or free) and it worked (mostly). Now, with FOSS, the method of software is essentially valueless to anything but the furtherance of software itself, and the value is in what people can actually do with it. A hammer should not have a copyright, the act of driving in a nail shouldn't be patentable.

What's disturbing to me is what this says about the profitability of the entire sector, as it now stands, once you get past "boutique" electronics like Apple products, and into a larger, sustainable software economy and ecosystem. All the major software houses are in a scramble to find their own relevancy. In the end-user markets, the majors seem to have settled on "look and feel." But that's a failure too. If we keep trending towards patent law in this way, denying each other simple tools like a "menu grid of rounded boxes," "ribbons," "swiping a finger," or even the use of the word "app," everyone is going to suffer. Microsoft isn't alone in this one, not by a long shot, and it's hard to tell who started it.

But now that the battlefield has moved away from copyright and licensing, and toward patents, what we have is a very deliberate circular firing squad. Patent law is designed that way. It doesn't matter who started it, because in the same stroke they're all finishing it. It's like Jonestown. Do not drink the Kool-Aid of acrimony. That's cheap and plentiful, and deadly. It's a far better idea that we take stock of where we are, figure out where we're going, and carefully decide if that's really some place we can live.