Yes except for two things. For one, when I say "problem" I mean it in terms of the mistake Apple made, this is provided by the context of Apple needing to learn a lesson (there mistake was licensing the stuff). For another, Apple lost because the court determined that the items that Apple had not licensed were not protected because there was either prior art or they were the only solutions(from the article I linked). Specifically according to that article, the court found that Microsoft had copied 189 elements of which 179 were licensed and the other 10 were not protected.

Except that's not the lesson Apple needed to learn. Apple copyrighted all their design elements, they just then went and legally licensed them to Microsoft and got a bit upset when Windows didn't turn out to be a cheap knock off of their idea no one would want to buy. Patents wouldn't have helped a bit in this instance because they actually gave Microsoft a license.

As to this case specifically, it sort of depends on how it eventually gets granted, but it appears that Apple is overreaching by a reasonable margin. Design Patents have a certain amount of validity in that they form a sort of appearance trademark. There's an argument to be made that if someone makes a product that looks identical to yours in such a way that there is confusion as to what it actually is that this is a problem, both for you as a company, but also for consumers. As such the aggregate of an Apple store may potentially be potentially be a valid subject for a design patent, but I'm not sure individual elements should be or how much of that aggregate you would need to copy for it to be a violation.

For one, TFA doesn't actually say that they will never provide that energy, it says they won't do it right now, which is obvious to anyone with half a brain. Pretty much the only people who believe they can are the last few remaining anti-nuclear hypocrites who believe that Climate Change is the biggest threat to human life on this planet and will cause demographic collapse but simultaneously think that nuclear power is worse.

Aside from that the article is full of the usual reduce consumption bullshit which fails to understand human nature. Even if we were to follow her advice and cut back out standard of living dramatically, the only way to actually reduce aggregate energy usage would be to say that everyone who doesn't live in a western nation has to keep the standard of living they have now. Efficiency is great, making things like public transport actually work is also great, the idea that people are going to voluntarily make significant reductions in their standard of living or that they should is idiotic. We can and eventually will be less stupid with how we use energy, but there are the better part of 6 billion people whose standard of living is worse than we had in the 19th century, they're not going to cut their energy use and we can't cut ours enough to offset theirs.

And what would those institutions of science teach if everyone kept everything they know a deep dark secret to protect it from being copied? The fact that patents get you paid are nice and that certainly helps foster innovation, but the thing you're actually paying for with the temporary monopoly is the publication. To get a patent you have to explain how your idea works(or that's the idea anyway), this means that inventors have to weigh up a guaranteed monopoly for a fixed period of time or a secret which could keep them on the gravy train for life or could be discovered tomorrow.

Patents help to guarantee us the shoulders of giants on which to stand.

That's not to say there aren't lots of issues with patents, or that the patent office is perfect, but there's a reasonable correlation between the advent and expansion of patents and the expansion of human knowledge, and the fact that patents require knowledge to be shared indicates this relationship might be at least partially causal. At the very least the argument that "patents would have stopped all human knowledge" is fundamentally wrong since a) they've been around since the 14th century, and b) a whole lot more stuff has been invented since then than was invented previously

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And you need to find the right problem to try and solve.

Congress made what Aaron Schwartz did a felony, and in many cases the same actions with different intent should be a felony. This left the prosecutors with the choice of giving him a slap on the wrist and calling him a naughty boy or charging him with a felony. There was no intermediate action for them to take it was felony or nothing because there is no misdemeanor version of the acts he committed. If he'd plead down to some totally unrelated crime, a judge would probably have rejected the deal.

Yes you have a prosecutor trying to enhance his career with a celebrity case, but that isn't necessarily evil in and of itself, as letting him off with no penalty at all was not the right thing to do either. He knew what he was doing was wrong and needed to face a penalty for that.

Fundamentally in this case you have a brilliant young man who did something idiotic as young men often do. He was offered a couple of quite generous plea deals which for reasons of his own he rejected. After that he seems to have been brought to understand exactly what he was facing which was something damned scary. Again for reasons of his own he chose to end his own life rather than facing that pressure. Whether his current circumstances were the direct cause or just the straw that broke the camel's back neither you, nor I, nor anyone else will ever know. This was a tragedy for everyone involved including himself as, as I have stated, other options existed. I cannot say for certain he wouldn't have gotten 50 years, but even murderers generally don't get maximum sentences served consecutively. Personally I'd have been surprised if he got 5 years in minimum security, and he could very well have walked free.

The point of this is not to blame Aaron Schwartz, he did something stupid and suffered from a mental illness which got the better of him. It's not to say the prosecutors were angels. The point is to say that no one here was a monster. No one tortured Aaron Schwartz. No one killed him. Things could have been handled better and in hindsight maybe they would have been, but I've seen no evidence of gross misconduct on the part of anyone involved in this, maybe there's more we don't know about, and using threats of maximum sentences no one is going to serve to avoid a trial isn't exactly saintly behavior, but it's the behavior of humans, not monsters. Mostly what I haven't seen is evidence the justice system failed him, because it wasn't given a chance to.

We'd all rather Aaron Schwartz was still alive, we'd all rather he'd have been offered a plea that didn't involve a felony and that he'd taken it, but he isn't, and he wasn't, and no one killed him.

He got offered four months not fifty years and not even child molesters get maximum sentences served consecutively, he did something he knew was illegal and incredibly stupid.

Dud he deserve fifty years? No. Was there a snowball's chance in hell he'd have gotten fifty years? No. Do you have a legal right to a slap on the wrist and a warning because you're stupid? No. Aaron Schwartz killed himself, to avoid four months in jail and a felony conviction which for someone with his name recognition sound have had virtually no impact. Is that a tragedy? Sound there probably be a misdemeanor version of these crimes for people like assertion Aaron. Of course, but being told the maximum sentence isn't abuse, and if his defense lawyer didn't tell him that before he even rejected the plea the lawyer should be sacked.

I was referring to Wisconsin, and the congressional district populations which is what they're actually calling for are closer in population than I had thought. There's still gerrymandering going on, and I tend to knee jerk distrust any politician who suggests changing voting districts because they're all crooked.

I have no beef with the idea that conservatives or liberals should have their voices heard and that a more proportional voting system would be a better choice, but every time politicians are given the opportunity to divide up a group of voters they use it to rig the results, on both sides of the line, and they shouldn't be allowed to do it in this instance or any other.

Maybe I think that getting felt up by the TSA on the rare occasions I fly is at worst a minor inconvenience not some fundamental loss of freedom.
The Republican governor of my home state trying to make the electoral college votes if my home state proportional by voting district so 40% of the population get 80% of the vote is a bit more concerning and more if a threat to freedom, but disenfranchising half the population of a large number of swing states and rigging the presidential election for the foreseeable future is way less of a problem than having to wait half an hour to fly.

1. The patent system doesn't and shouldn't "guarantee" you success. It gives you 10 years to succeed, can't get it done in 10 years, tough luck.
2. The patent office is most certainly overworked and underfunded, but you won't solve that by screaming "eliminate patents", and Slashdot's definition of novelty is incredibly narrow(if it's not something out of star trek it's not novel) while their definition of prior art is incredibly broad(if star trek did it with a prop there's prior art). There are certainly bullshit patents out there, and there will probably always be bullshit patents out there, fortunately they only last 10 years so we only have to get better, not perfect.
3. Again this is somewhat of a Slashdot bias, companies certainly seem to trying to weasel out of their disclosure requirements and some amorphous patents have been approved, but it probably isn't as bad as we'd like to believe(most of us want every patent we don't like to be invalid). Once again though, we won't fix this problem by eliminating patents, we'll fix it by doing patents right. Given how important getting the patent system right is for everyone it's probably a department we ought to spend a bit more money on.

What is most useful for the consumer is for other people to know how you did what you did. Before patents that kind of stuff was kept secret and lots of technologies were lost either completely or for a significant period of time(Damascus steel being a specific example). That's been part of patent law since the 14th century. In exchange for a period of protection you had to explain how you did it.

Sure, theoretically having every idea free and open from day one would be even better, but it has never worked that way. Inventions are only valuable if no one can copy them more cheaply and the kinds of companies which can copy them most cheaply tend not to be particularly innovative unless pushed.

People really have no idea how simple it would be to create perfect knockoffs at a lower price, particularly if the inventor is an individual.

Except that before patents, we had mostly trade and guild secrets enforced by beating the living daylights out of each other, frequent loss of critical knowledge and intermittent dark ages and after patents are put into place we have the greatest period of innovation in human history. I know correlation is not causation, but when you're arguing that there is a causal relationship between patents and the opposite of what happened, correlation is enough to disprove you.

Sure, developing nations steal the ideas, as they always have, including the US when it was a developing nation, but that's really beside the point as it's never really been a problem and still isn't. When developing nations become sufficiently developed that they want to interact more fully with the rest of the world (ie sell some of the stuff they ignored the patents for) they start following the rules, as even China is starting to do, and before that point, they aren't really a trade influencing factor.

There are a lot of issues with the current patent landscape, but we've seen far more innovation since patents were introduced than we ever did before and a lot less knowledge has been lost.

I think you're just using too narrow a definition of "patent troll". Patents are designed to foster innovation. They give an idea value so that people will take the risk of investing in that idea whatever the scale of the inventor. If all ideas are trivially copied once their details are known then either the ideas have no value so no one invests in them or the ideas get kept secret and we don't get to know about them and build on them. Good patents provide this functionality, they temporarily stifle competition in order to foster innovation.

Bad patents on the other hand merely stifle innovation. Patents can be bad for any number of reasons(the patent holder has no intention of seeking investment for them, the idea itself is trivial(a hard one since the whole idea of patents is that once someone shows you an idea it usually seems trivial), or the patent should not belong to the holder. Essentially these are patents with no upside for the community.

If you wield a bad patent you're a patent troll be you some little company with no assets or the latest do no wrong tech firm, if you use a good patent you're not.

This still leaves us with working out how the hell to determine things like triviality and prior art, but at least we don't have to try and determine intent. Patents, like copyrights and all sorts of other intellectual property, are a necessary evil, they always have downsides, but they're supposed to have upsides.When they don't, the holder is a troll.

They can sue you for the violation of any term of the contract you signed that wasn't either deliberately misleading, invalid, illegal or contradicted by something you can prove the salesman said. It's called a contract freely entered into by you.
Prior to today, the library of Congress made you can't unlock provisions illegal, buy they are not any longer, so you are stuck with what you signed. Don't want a contract that forbids unmoving the phone for the duration of the contract, don't sign one.

The theory is the usual "Free Market Fallacy" wherein the cost of entry to every industry is effectively zero so if you don't drop your price to $15 someone will enter the market who will. The issue of course is that the cost of entry into most industries is far from zero and so the $15 guy never enters the market and the price remains at $20. Potentially existing competitors could drive the price down, but race to the bottom doesn't really work for existing players unless they believe they can pick up and maintain a substantial enough increase in market share to make up for the loss in profits over time.

The problem which reality is showing us(though no good economist, especially right wing economists ever let pesky things like reality get in the way) is that the automatic relocation of even new workers doesn't work the way that economic theory says it should. People who work in what would be traditionally called Blue Collar roles are not always in those roles because of any lack of education or opportunity. In many cases people who do manual jobs do so because they enjoy them and/or have an affinity for them which they would not have if they were doing some sort of indoor office role, plenty of people seem to feel the same way about the non assembly line areas of food service.

In short, labor is not fungible. Not only is someone who has trained as a machinist for twenty years going to magically transform into someone working in HR overnight, but it appears that a person who if a machinist job was available would have taken that job for twenty years won't successfully become an HR drone simply because that is the job that is available. Everyone has different skills and different personalities, and just because you or I are comfortable working in an office in front of a computer doesn't mean that everyone is, and that's not even taking into account whether someone who would be comfortable doing that kind of job is able to access the education and training necessary to excel in it.

We on Slashdot tend to have a somewhat biased view of the world, we are, for the most part, information workers in a world where information work is expanding and our opportunities are a darned site rosier than many, but imagine for a moment if you were forced to do construction or work in a restaurant(or if you do those things imagine being an IT worker). It's not just about skills it's about what people are good at and can live with doing.