in what way does that make the point irrelevant? the problem still exists. just because you see a way of apportioning blame does not make the problem go away.

no, no and a thousand times no. patents are (were) not about ideas. they are (were) about implementations of ideas. everybody can have a good idea. until they make a working implementation of it, that idea is worth nothing.

well, as we all should know by now, pirating is only about teh money. that's the only reason anybody ever pirates anything: because they want to rob other people. it never has anything to do with sharing with friends, or convenience, or a desire to have something now and not wait 6 months until it becomes available legally. no, if you pirate you are a criminal and you hate america ... (i could go on like this all day)

are you seriously trying to suggest that at some stage in apple headquarters the following conversation took place?

A: yeah, i've got this cool idea of having LPs on iTunes
B: oh, okay. what will be in them?
A: well, songs and some images and maybe some texts
B: okay, sounds like a good idea.
A: shall we charge a band extra for it?
B: yes, let's charge 10000 dollars, because this will prevent bad content from being offered as LPs

i'd say the lack of legal accountability for software is a historical accident. if you wanted to, you could say that computers were developed in two areas: firstly very expensive mainframes and workstations from ibm and the like and secondly toy computers from sinclair, commodore, tandy and the rest. with the first class of computer you certainly did get guarantees from the manufacturer that everything would work and you could get on their case if something terrible happened. with the second class this would have seemed ridiculous.

this of course does lead to the ridiculous situation as you described where apple and microsoft vie over the title of the best operating system in the world where in the licensing agreement phrases can be found like "This software is fit to do absolutely nothing. If you use it and something goes wrong it's your fault".

strangely FOSS seems to strengthen their case, the ideal of FOSS being that anybody who's sufficiently skilled and patient should be able to roll their own operating system or text editor or whatever oh and here's this stuff someone else made when they sat down one day and tried to write a piece of software for music notation---do with it what you will. i think if regulation were imposed on software for the home pc market it could turn out to be legally difficult to treat FOSS and proprietary software differently. certainly if ms or apple were forced to write in their eulas that "this software is an operating system and it promises to fulfill certain requirements *long list of requirements*", their astro-turfers would go crazy discrediting FOSS for not having these clauses in the GPL or whatever license.

one point. cvs transmissions were designed and implemented by the dutch company DAF in 1958.

no, i don't think anybody is demanding that apple create and maintain a 3rd party synchronization scheme. that's a strawman you've built up there. what people find objectionable is that apple has recently modified a product to prevent it working with anything other than their own products.

let me spell it out to you:
modifying a product for other reasons than making it incompatible with 3rd party products is not objectionable. if compatibility with 3rd party products is broken, well that's just the way it is.
modifying a product to make it incompatible with 3rd party products is not okay. it's a bad way of trying to increase market share in a different market.

yes, it should be up to palm to make sure that syncing with itunes works. apple shouldn't lift a finger one way or the other. instead apple has invested time and money in changing how itunes works in order to reduce the capabilities enjoyed by palm's customers.

the trouble is, theora does meet the requirements, and it's the only halfway modern codec which does. however the requirements for accepting a video tag for html from apple seem to be that it cannot be a royalty-free codec because that would allow firefox to continue to exist, which would slow market share growth for safari. instead, a patent-encumbered codec will make it impossible for free-software to implement html5 and manufacturers of proprietary software will have another string in their monopoly.

no, no. totally wrong. computers were expensive because they were big and manufacture was less automated than nowadays. nowadays i'd wager just as high a proportion or even higher goes into r&d at hardware manufacturers.

also i doubt many important advances in car technology come because of F1. there's no reason why they should do. you could probably argue that F1 gives the r&d department of car manufacturers a hobby, but you'd be pushing it to say that any advance came specifically because of F1. F1 may give manufacturers a chance to show off the advances they have made, though modern rules make this rather dubious.

i'm sorry, whose source code?

oh, i think i would blame microsoft for this. instead of using their clout to standardise connections and drivers, they've often tried to do the exact opposite. the result? every printer needs a driver, every scanner needs a driver, every mobile phone needs a driver, etc. microsoft has dug its own grave here.

this one's pretty easy to answer and i thought about it when i wrote my first post. 2 points:
if you don't hit anybody and nobody notices you're shooting in their direction, i can see the case for revoking your gun license
if you don't hit anybody but people notice and are scared then you have caused them to be scared and that's worse.

can you think of another example? at the moment i can't see much wrong with the basic idea i posited above.

i don't get it. if i write a text and don't kill anybody or drive drunk and don't kill anybody, society may see fit to revoke privileges (for example my driving license) but it shouldn't be able to throw me in prison or fine me because i haven't actually caused anybody any harm.

if however i do hit someone and hurt them, then the law can punish me for it.

not quite. as already posted here, AAPL/GOOG have an obligation to do what the shareholders want. however the shareholders have a moral duty to be good people, just like we all do. being a shareholder in a company does not give you the moral right to behave badly.

the only problem i can think of is wine itself. if i remember correctly, wine has lots of assembly code for x86 in it. it is really one of the very few free software projects to have this.