Given the choice "X, or the article summary is bollocks", the correct answer is _always_ "the article summary is bollocks". You should know that.

Now the truth is that Apple is indeed not funnelling domestic profits overseas. What they are doing, they are keeping overseas profits overseas.

For example, the government pays for police that will arrest people going to an Apple Store with guns and taking whatever they want.

There is, once something goes to court and someone gets set free because evidence is not admissable due to an illegal search.

Have a look who made that ruling. Then come back and tell us who would overturn this.

But if it happens, a lawyer can now point to this ruling, which states that searching the contents of a mobile phone without warrant during an arrest is almost always illegal, and that any evidence coming from the phone is inadmissable. Which means that evidence that the police _might_ have found in another way is now inadmissable.

What problem do you see with open source software? If there is a legal requirement that software behaves in certain ways, then that is independent of whether it is open source or not. The only difference is that with open source, you might be able to veryify that the mandated behaviour is there.

Of course, open source software that behaves according to some law can be modified by anyone with the source code and the necessary expertise to break that law. If creating such software is illegal, then the person doing it would do something illegal. But that has nothing to do really with open source.

That's completely wrong. The maker of proprietary technology is given monopoly protection for making the invention public. If Open Source were allowed to copy that technology then the incentive would be largely gone.

Take Xerox with their extremely successful copying technology. Any competitor could have made a copy of their Xerox copier as long as the software inside was open source? Or Xerox' largest competitors could have developed that software together and buried Xerox?

The tactics of patent trolls is not to sue you and win a lawsuit, it is to sue you or threaten to sue, in the hope that you cough up money in order for them to go away. Prior art doesn't help there; they can sue you no matter how inane or obvious the patent is, and no matter how much prior art there is. You still have to spend money on lawyers and courts.

Isn't all software maths, and therefore not patentable, or does that not apply to open source software?

Here's a bit of software:
printf ("Hello, world\n");

Now you write the formula. Let's see how simple it is.

It's really just an argument used by lazy thinkers. They don't want software patents (with good reasons, because there is a huge number of software patents that are in my opinion obvious), they read that maths is not patentable, so they shout "software is maths, so it is not patentable". There are a few huge problems with it:

1. You can of course claim that all software is maths, and call everyone stupid who doesn't believe it, but that doesn't make it true. If someone says "it is a mathematical function", I say "show me the function". Which never happens.

2. Mathematical formulas cannot be patented because that would forever (or several years) completely block the use of that function for anything. However, even if a program is a mathematical function, the slightest change to that program creates a very much different mathematical function.

3. Here's the big one, probably a bit hard to understand: When laws are created, the law makers want to achieve some effect, and pick the words for the law that seem best to achieve that effect. If you then find out that the words don't actually mean what the lawmakers thought they mean, the result is not that the effect of the law changes, but that the wording of the law changes. For example, if people made laws concerning vegetables and wanted tomatoes included but didn't realise that tomatoes are a fruit and not a vegetable, that would just mean that the wording of the law is going to change. If you convince lawmakers that software isn't patentable because it is maths, but the lawmakers want software to be patentable, they will just change the wording of the law. So nothing would be achieved.

Circular argument, and therefore not acceptable. You are saying all software is maths, therefore all software is maths. I'm saying computers are not maths, therefore the printf call isn't maths. Just as valid as your argument (which means not at all).

The problem is that you can easily make a claim "this is maths", but you will find it impossible to show the actual maths. You say "it is maths". I say "if it is maths, then _show_ me the maths. " If you can't show me the maths, then either it isn't maths, or it doesn't matter because maths that you can't show me doesn't exist.

Nonsense. There are no mathematical functions in my Mac. There are lots of voltages and currents and semiconductors, but not a single mathematical function.

Any invention is made up of a large number of atoms, which interact with each other according to the laws of quantum physics. Since quantum physics is not patentable, nothing is patentable. Right?

And actually, not every algorithm _can_ be implemented on a Turing machine for two reasons: 1. A Turing machine running a program can only either stop in a zero state, stop in a one state, or run forever. That's not really very useful. 2. A Turing machine can not be implemented for most algorithms because the Turing program would be so huge that it couldn't be represented with all the atoms in the world.

You forgot that Apple is eeevil. And Google isn't, so Google is right. Sorry, we are talking about Amazon. Amazon isn't Apple, so Amazon isn't evil, so Amazon is right. And Kindle uses Android which is free so Kindle doesn't use DRM. Well, it isn't DRM because it works on all Kindles. But Apple uses AAC for music which is proprietary and evil and DRM. Even though the A's don't stand for Apple but for Advanced and Audio and there is no DRM, but it is Apple and Apple is evil.

Do I get modded up now?