No, patents protect the innovator so they can get their product to market without copy cats devaluing their research.

Can't we just let patents autoexpire every 5 - 10 years so we don't have these issues? It works great in medicine because it gives big pharma a chance to make money innovating and then the copy cats can produce generics and make their own profits, forcing big pharma to keep innovating. Fast expiring patents are a great idea there, why not in software?

There's a SG1 episode where they meet a society who have the technology for 1 pilot to control an entire squadron of unmanned fighters at once, and their enemy had fewer manned fighters. That's where I see drones heading, and if you can come up with a good control scheme for it you'll wipe the floor with any opponent who doesn't have that techology.

So they've migrated an open solution to a vendor locked in solution? Sweet.

Oh and I forgot to mention Android is open source, so you can port its shell to iOS all you like :)

On the high end Android phones are far superior to Apple's offerings. On the low end they are decent quality and cheaper.

This is actually a pretty moderate approach compared to just suing single mothers for millions of dollars for downloading an MP3 once.

ATI cards suck? That much is obvious. I made a permanent switch to NVIDIA after I had 3 cards from ATI in a row (top of the line for their era, each) and had serious issues with framerate stability and texture glitches. The final straw was when the official AMD driver for Linux caused a kernel panic. I switched to NVIDIA and have been a happier gamer and a happier Linux enthusiast.

One is provided by the government for everyone, the other requires paying tens of thousands of dollars.

The inevitable comparison of USA to NK appears! Anyone who makes this comparison has no sense of scope or scale.

What a fine way of guaranteeing every citizen massive debts (public or private) for the privilege of a job.

For the ~communist~ (read totalitarian hellhole) rulers in that country it will be easy. They own the network and can monitor all traffic with ease and locating rogue connections would be trivially easy. Combine that with Chinese style filtering on steroids and you can keep denying your people basic human rights for the forseeable future.

North Korea is an inexcusable mess of a country that wouldn't even exist today without China's external backing. China actually disagrees with North Korea's policies, but the *idea* of communism (even though NK's implementation is the worst on Earth) still holds a lot of patriotic sway in China (being the only successful communist country). I personally can't wait for NK to actually do something stupid so China drops their support (do you really think China wants to be involved in some kind of war because the "ally" they babysit is misbehaving, hell no!) and that little country collapses in on itself.

Typically communist countries are enthralled in the idea of advancing technology almost to the point of obsession, but unless you count failing to implement 50 year old missile technology North Korea doesn't exactly make strides here (although they'll claim to have put men on the moon before the USA and have broken warp 5 barrier if you asked them, no doubt). North Korea is just a sad little excuse of a country. God forbid that they might have access to modern technology and be able to communicate with each other, then they might figure out how deeply broken their country is. Yet another day in "communist" paradise.

It would put an end to WINE and ReactOs (although react never got off the ground).