Google, Apple and Amazon are not doing anything wrong. They are in business to make money for their stockholders of which many I bet are UK citizens. In some jurisdictions they are legally REQUIRED to operate their enterprises to the best legal advantage of their stockholders.

Those UK citizens pay taxes on the dividends and capital gains they realize from owning stock in these companies. Not only that but these companies provide extremely useful services to UK citizens thereby enriching their lives.

They ALSO employ many people who ALSO pay taxes on their wages, and by being employers relieve the state from having to pay for the upkeep of these people who would otherwise be on the dole.

Not only that but there are other taxes on value added transactions that result from the economic activities involved. Consumption based taxes are generally viewed to have the least negative impact on economic growth of any taxes.

Then of course there is the whole question of the macroeconomics of the situation. It is generally held that taxes on businesses are inefficient in terms of encouraging economic growth. Such policies are not productive overall to the economy. This is why business taxes in Europe are generally relatively low. It is conscious sound policy decision based on scientific analysis of the economic facts.

http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/pdf/themes/02_taxation.pdf

In other words this is a completely RUBBISH article in every way possible.

There are plenty of service jobs which require local talent. Add HVAC, and CDL licensed truck drivers to your list.

    Ummm.. I worked with a plumbing company for a while.. There was a whole lot of shit, literally. I was lucky, I just did their IT work. I could talk to the techs who had done messier jobs from a distance. If their blue uniform is now brown, don't get too close. :)

    It was entertaining, and absolutely disgusting, watching them clean out of of the tank trucks. It registered something like 10k pounds overweight, because of the sewage sludge that had built up in the bottom of the tank. At least the guy who went in to clean it got to wear a biohazard suit and respirator.

    I only had to deal with the trucks while I was wiring up their GPS tracking. It was the first chance I had to drive a 10 speed truck. (private property, CDL be damned). The drivers were gone for the day, and the other staff present were afraid to try to drive it up to the shop. The work/cargo vans were harder to drive. Their blind spot is anything but in front of them.

I would so totally pay $20 to watch it live online.

Apparently charging people to watch suicide or homocide or otherwise physically severely injured or death is illegal in most countries. Well, unless it has to do with large crowds, multi-million dollar player contracts, and something called "sport"

I haven't seen Into Darkness but a lot of this review covered what was painfully realized in the first movie: no longer is Trek about philosophy, ethics, tolerance, gray areas and real world problems. It's mostly absolute good versus absolute evil. I think the driving force behind the bad guy in the first movie was largely a misunderstanding ... which is incredibly boring. His motivation was confusingly laughable.

Unsurprisingly I'm pretty sure I heard JJ Abrams tell Jon Stewart that "he never liked Star Trek" on The Daily Show. Well, now he's had a chance to kill it by turning it 100% into a modern day blockbuster action flick and shirking any attempt to tackle an interesting philosophical or ethical dilemma as the main plot. As the modern reemergence of comic book and super hero movies have shown, those films are a dime a dozen that anyone can do. Tackling something deeper while still holding our attention is the hard part. The Watchmen was a good candidate for it but fell short. I'm sure JJ Abrams would rather cover up the complicated parts that question good versus evil with another lens flare.

> What should open source programmers do in parts of the world without software patents?

Nothing. If there are no software patents you can't be sued for infringement, right?

    It's dataminers. I worked with a few. Lists of information are bought and sold frequently. Some of the lists are bits and pieces. Different companies aggregate the information differently.

Consider these totally fictional people. In this case, they are different.

John Smith, SSN 123-45-6789 DOB 01/01/1980
John Smith, DOB 01/01/##
John Smith SSN ###-##-6789

They would all be associated to be the same person. Some list providers only provide partial SSN. Some partial DOB. Sometimes neither, but a physical address.

Some providers consider people who lived at the same address in the same timeframe (+- 5 years) to be related. So if you live in an apartment for a year, in their eyes you're actually related to 8 set so of other tenants. For bill collectors, that's good enough to say you're a source of information..

Phone numbers are a life-long identifier. It doesn't matter that most people have changed phone numbers dozens of times. Again, having the same phone number can tie you in as family..

And sometimes their lists are just plain dirty. I've seen lists by places who take random bits and pieces and stick them together.

It's all fun and games, unless a search warrant is issued for your home, because some list provider tied your address to someone else.

No, in 1490 the Church knew the Earth was round. The fact is that any educated person from the 3rd century BC on in Europe knew the Earth was round. In 1477 the Vatican commissioned two globes for the new Vatican library.

I like the beginning of your idea..

If they make $5/yr on the delivered junk mail that you receive, $6.00 should make sure you *don't* receive it.

The USPS can already quantify bulk mailings to your zipcode. It's a simple matter to pay for your address to be excluded.

1790.

That's because it's tough to find (USPTO Examiners search their own internal databases first, then Google, and then move on to things like IEEE databases. They're not typically searching Github), and if it needs interpretation, then people will disagree about what it shows. For example, if you wanted a patent that claims "1. An operating system, comprising: Linux," then your patent application is going to be anticipated by Linux. However, if you wanted a patent that claims some esoteric way for managing memory in the network stack, and someone has done something similar but not exactly the same, then maybe there's an argument that your implementation is different in a nonobvious way.

That's absolute poppycock. Anyone who knows geometry (I assume all competent scientists do) and investigates the situation will quickly determine the Earth is round.

The Pythaogoreans speculated the Earth was round in the 6th century BC, and Eratosthenes proved it and came up with a pretty accurate measure of it's diameter in the 3rd century BC. He even devised a system of longtitude and latitude.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth

WHAT DO THEY TEACH IN SCHOOL THESE DAYS?

The idea that scientists though the Earth was flat in the 1800s is the most ridiculous thing I have read on slashdot, I have a 5 digit ID!!!

I doubt if 97% of priests believe in God.

Certainly the Buddhists don't take a position on the question.

Yes, and that time frame is imposed by a government regulatory process known as FDA approval.

I'm fairly sympathetic to the idea of extending patents to account for the regulatory process. A lawyer once told me that a patent is:

A contract between an inventor and the government in which the inventor discloses the best known way to practice an invention so that it can be repeated by others in exchange for the right to prevent others from practicing that invention for a specified period of time.

So that specified time is right now 20 years. Well if the government also imposes a regulatory process that takes 15 years or some other variable but significant duration before sale can take place the patent contract becomes quite meaningless.

Holding patents is a defensive measure in the following ways:

1. It places art in the public record which may later be claimed as prior art. Of course other publication may also server the same purpose.

2. The patent office eats it's own dog food, that is prior art in the form of patents seems more likely to be searched and cited than the general literature.

3, Patents in a particular field may discourage a competitor from filing patents or even working on the same problem.

4. Patents in a field may trigger mutually beneficial cross licensing opportunities rather than lawsuits.

5. Patents in a field may provide counter-suit fodder or also M.A.D. style deterrence that is sort of an informal mutual cross-license that is cheaper than an actual shit storm of lawsuits.

... and...

... are both entirely true. As the article notes, in order for a patent to be enforceable, all of the inventors have to be properly named on the patent - no extra inventors, and no leaving anyone out - and they all need to either assign the patent to a common entity, or agree to jointly participate in any lawsuit:

So, yes, it would be difficult, if not nigh-impossible, to enforce these FOSS patents.
Let me repeat that...
Enforce these Free and Open Source Software patents.

There seems to be some fundamental confusion about purpose. And who are you going to enforce them against? The trolls, as the summary suggests? But they're trolls because they don't make any products, and if they don't make anything, then they can't infringe. So, what, in the name of "defending against patent trolls", Free OSS foundations are going to start suing manufacturers such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, or Red Hat?

All of that said, there is a very good reason the FOSS community should be filing patents - patent Examiners look to their own databases first for prior art. If FOSS inventors file patent applications, let them be published, and then abandon the application to the public domain, that will add to the set of available prior art and make it more difficult for trolls to get patents. And since you never intend for such applications to issue, they can be drafted and filed very cheaply: throw in your source code, your comments or flow charts or functional specs, slap a single claim on the end, and you're good enough to publish.