I've said it before, and I'll say it again: not having patents would confer significant, often insurmountable advantages to large corporations.

I do advocate patent reform, but outright doing away with it will be bad for all but a handful of people at the very top of the corporate ladder.

Sounds like winapp2 is an independently-developed "application" that Piriform does not own. If you wrote your own libraries to parse the file, then they'll have trouble successfully suing you. But that doesn't mean they won't sue. If you're using their libraries, then best ditch it and rewrite that piece yourself.

In either case, you need a lawyer. Let the lawyer respond.

Where have you been the past 100 years? It's been this way since the industrial revolution. It's just worse now because the resources needed to make progress are greater than even, yet at the same time, the rate of (expected) progress is more rapid than ever.

Fair has no meaning in business. All's fair in love and war. Business is war. People study war texts like the Art of War to gain an edge while doing business. There's even a book or two on the very matter. Problems arise when a business wages war against the people and its government, instead of other businesses. Problems also arise when people and government become collateral damage to the war businesses wage against each other. But those are not relevant from a business standpoint, only from a social standpoint. And unfortunately, businesses have done both over the past 100 years, and with the government weakened and corrupt, the people are beginning to suffer for it.

But things are not all bleak. We are still able to recognize the corporate excess and greed, and discuss this topic openly and freely (for the most part). Things aren't better than they were 50 years ago, but at the very least, we can see this and respond to it as best as we can. That, when taken away, will be the beginning of the end, when you know corporations have fully taken over. Until then, I think there is still hope.

In the case of Android, I think Google's been more than fair. They haven't restricted third party stores from their devices (like Apple). Their policies are not arbitrary (though total enforcement is always difficult), nor are they anti-competitive (again like Apple).

If you want to open your own app store for Android, go right ahead. You can even have it exclusively host "piracy-enabling" apps. You can create a TOS for your own app store that you feel is just. That, I feel, is more than fair.

Now, should there be an appeals process? Certainly. There are always misleading or false reports. But I don't think Google, full of brilliant (and some not-so-brilliant) employees, would not have already thought of this. So either the ban is in appeal, or the app really did violate a TOS.

The question is, if this was a frivolous complaint, what measures will Google put in place to discourage people from trying to ban the competition. It isn't a matter of whether they have to do so, but if they don't make the playing field appear even, then people eventually will move to other app stores with a more lenient TOS.

That depends on your age, sex, race, and sexual orientation.

The only modern living relative of the infamous Hitler changed his surname. So you won't find any more of those, unless somebody changed it to "Hitler" from something else. And if they did that, then they were cultivating a particular reaction.

Did you know corporations can deduct an employee's compensation package from their income taxes? On the other hand, individuals get a very small deduction for each child that wouldn't even cover basic expenses.

Err, there's the FDIC for a reason. Unless you had over $200K ($250K now) in an account, you didn't lose a dime when the bank failed.

It took a bit of time to process all the claims at that time, so you didn't have access to your money immediately, but you eventually got it.

The thing about ripples is that it dissipates and eventually disappears. There were a ton of smaller, regional banks managed well ready to step up and take over. But because the government bailed out the big banks, these smaller banks with better management couldn't rise to the top. Likewise with your example, there are a ton of smaller advertising platforms out there ready to pounce should Doubleclick fail.

Hardly. I imagine free public wifi would be heavily throttled. QoS settings, in particular, would make it impossible to do things that require high bandwidth. It'd be most likely used to receive e-mail, maybe read wikipedia, and perhaps play flash games.

As for government regulating public wifi, it certainly can be used to censor certain speech, but not without breaking the first amendment. Private entities don't have the bill of rights to consider, while the government does. So any service provided by the government would protect free speech more.

And besides, nobody's taking away the landlines. I imagine if the FCC does censor say, indecent sites, the corporations won't. And if the corporations do irrespective of whether it's because of the government, then we have bigger problems than just government censorship of the internet.

Education is also a luxury item.

Internet access is an important part of today's society, just like education. It is almost a necessity for many common, everyday tasks, just like education.

The FCC already regulates television and provides every home with access to a set of television stations. I don't see why they couldn't regulate public wireless internet access.

The assumption you're making is that you're fighting an enemy soverign state. If your enemy does not have a "homeland", your retaliatory measures will be fairly useless.

Yeah, I believe that one. That's about the last thing anybody does with an iPhone anymore. I'm always a bit surprised it still has the ability to make calls each time Apple announces a new version.

Am I the only one who was wondering what a C library had to do with anything, or why it was insulting to be compared to it?

I like that version better.

When you write, your initial goal is to put as much down onto the piece of paper as possible. The booze, pizza, and closed-room helps.

This is also true of writing code. You don't expect production code to come out of binge coding, just code that will do what you want it to do. The engineering aspect can come later after a few refactors.

This is consequently why I think strict OOP is over-engineered, and fairly inefficient at getting things done. Scripting languages and their ilk, on the other hand, are far better at producing working code.

You are wrong. Your premise is correct, but your conclusion is wrong. You're advocating what's effectively a position of anarchy, and if you know history, you'll know that anarchy is not a course that will lead to progress.

See, there's something called economies of scale. A new product is expensive because it costs a lot to manufacture. It costs a lot to manufacture because the company manufacturing it does not know exactly how well it will sell, and hence will only allocate a certain amount of resources into making it. I.e., it will not make very many units.

This is true of all industries that deal with material goods.

Once a company has sales data, it can then begin to ramp up its production. Prices will then fall. How well a company does this, how quickly it responds to the rise or fall of demand, is a significant competitive advantage. This is why a lot of companies are focusing on point-of-sale tracking, and why you're seeing all these advertisements from IBM about "analytics".

A large company with much more resources (material property and capital) can ramp up much more quickly than a small business. This is a fact. Companies with lots of resources that cannot do this die very quickly and sometimes violently. It's a matter of survival of the fittest, and the fitness, like natural processes, is determined by how quickly and efficiently the organism can adapt.

Without patents, your small inventor is going to be ultimately completely screwed. While the new product is still in a niche market, the small inventor's small company will thrive. At this time, large companies will take notice. They will begin to copy the product. But they probably won't sell the copied product immediately. Instead, they'll sit on it and wait until the market leaves its niche status. If this never happens, the copy is shelved and the large company focuses on a different product. But once the product has sufficient market, the large company will jump in. It will out-manufacture the small company (who by now, isn't very small, but is still tiny when compared to the large company), and be able to sell at much lower prices.

Now, if the small company can ramp up production quickly enough, and with enough marketing dollars, the small company can regain much of this lost market within a short amount of time. However, the large company has a lot of revenue streams. And it can still thrive even if one product is losing money. The small company, with far fewer revenue streams, cannot afford to take a loss on their best-selling product. So the large company will go into a price war with the small company. And the large company will win.

But say that multiple large companies jump in at the same time, and that they will all be fighting to gain control of the market of this product. That still doesn't help the small company, because all that will do is drive the price down to its bare minimum, and again, based on economies of scale, the small company will not be able to sell as low as the large company.

The only way out for the small company is to out-innovate the large companies. The inventor who owns the small company needs to be one step ahead of the mass of resources the large company can bring to the table. Sometimes, this is possible. Most of the time, it is not.

Now, this is purely an economic viewpoint of what would happen if patents are removed. From a social viewpoint, it will discourage innovation. Why? Because people will realize that if they want to bring to market a new invention, they're facing a significant uphill battle, one that will not end until they become a large company themselves, or their company dies. So what they will do is work for an existing large company instead. It is a much easier way out, and people with starving kids waiting at the dining table for them to come home with the bacon will take that way.

So all of the potential inventors and innovators will go work for large companies. Large companies are risk adverse. Car companies spent millions to bury new inventions that threaten their existence. This includes engine technology, and battery technology. Back at the turn of the 20th century, the tobacco industry spent a ton of money lobbying congress to make marijuana illegal. Large companies are not interested in innovation, only in keeping their existing revenue streams alive. And the most efficient way to do that is to put money into having to do nothing. They can spend $100K a year lobbying congress to keep their business alive, or $100M to expand into something new, while incurring significant risk that the new product fails. (Kodak is a lesson every CEO in the world is learning from--how a company managed to innovate itself out of business.) Which avenue do you think a large company will take?

Progress will crawl without patents. It will all but disappear. It may not completely disappear, because there will always be a few who will get through the cracks. But it will be slowed significantly. And if it's not enough to overcome our natural state of continuous regression, then society itself will regress.

The system needs patents. Or it needs significant, stringent corporate regulations which effectively duplicate the purpose of patents, but would add a level of complexity to the law that yet again, enables the haves and disables the have-nots.

The solution is not to do away with patents completely. It is not to throw the small inventors to the wolves and see who survies.

A better solution is to take a page from trademark law, and separate patents by industry. Industry categories will have shorter or longer patent times based on how quickly a product can be manufactured. And they will have separate grantability requirements that will be based on the obvious standards of that particular industry. Couple that with explicitly limiting patents to things that are manufactured, and whose manufacturing chain ends in an artificial (man-made) machine, and that will bring the patent system back in line with its intention, to promote the useful arts and sciences.