There's very little thought on the Moon. It's easy for there to be much more water.

. .. that people didn't come up with the idea of keying the shape until 1952.

Seriously, the lack of reversibility is excusable, but the failure to visibly key the external shape was not.

Steve Jobs wasn't going to license iOS to anyone else. And the whole array of hardware makers and carriers who saw what happened in PCs weren't going to let Apple be the phone-Microsoft any more than they were going to let Microsoft be the phone-Microsoft.

Seriously, there wasn't just one error, there was an entire multi-year legacy of disaster that combined. But for a few highlights:

1) Everybody making phones knew what happened to PC makers; they had become thin-margin commodity assemblers who put high-margin Intel chips and high-margin Microsoft operating systems in boxes. None of them wanted to become the new clonemakers, mating Qualcomm chips to an MS OS at thin margins. If there was a viable alternative to Microsoft, they were going to use it.

2) The US market for phones was and is is largely dominated by what the phone carriers are willing to sell to their subscribers. Nobody at the phone companies wanted to pay Microsoft money in order to become the next IBM, begging for Microsoft's goodwill on the eve of the release of Windows 95. If there was a viable alternative to Microsoft, they were going to use it.

3) In November 2007, everybody saw Microsoft screw over all the makers of non-Apple portable music players and all the non-Apple sellers of digital music when Microsoft threw over the whole PlaysForSure ecosystem in the launch of the incompatible Microsoft-brand Zune music player and its music service. Everybody was put on notice that Microsoft was not going to stand behind its platforms and the partners who invested in them.

That's why the main platform in competition with Apple was going to be an alternative to Microsoft. Preferably something open-source enough that it would be practical to break with its vendor, but in any case vended by someone other than Microsoft.

But, you know, that wasn't the end of Microsoft's mistakes. When, in the last gasp chance for Microsoft to salvage a role as the "third platform", Microsoft released Windows Phone, they broke compatibility with Windows Mobile, completely screwing over everybody who had ever invested anything in Microsoft handheld application development.

New York to Maintain Leadership in Population Decline

Thank you, I was just about to make my own post explaining this. If I had mod points . . .

Not necessarily. It is perfectly possible that skills trained by MBA programs are real, but in sufficiently small, specialized demand that the top programs train enough people to fill that demand.

By analogy, basketball involves real, trainable skills, that very definitely can command serious salaries. But the guy who just makes the 99.9999th percentile in the world at basketball skill isn't going to make much money, given the NBA only has 450 roster spots and there are 7,500 better players than him. If somehow the top 7,500 players all vanished from the Earth, his real skills would be in sudden demand. But as long as there are thousands of better players, he's not going to get called on by the Lakers.

It's long been an open secret that once you get past the schools plausibly able to claim "top ten" status (which about the top 15 programs all did), the ROI on full-time MBA programs starts dropping precipitously.

By the time you were down to a school that can only call itself "top 50" (like Illinois), you were just throwing money away. It's not like anybody was going through a full-time MBA program for pleasure or cultural enrichment.

The core of the lie is the conflation of being a taxi driver and being the owner of a taxi medallion.

Back in 2013-2014, NYC taxi medallions were selling for $1,300,000, Boston medallions were $625,000, Philadelphi medallions were $400,000, Chicago medallions were $330,000, Miami medallions were $300,000, and San Francisco medallions were $250,000. Sure, some individuals could get loans the size of mortgages and cover them by driving, but most of the time medallions were owned by cab companies (who also had economies of scale in fleet operations) and driven by employees of the companies. Even owner-drivers usually had an employee driving in off hours to help cover the loan. So, yeah, the people who owned the medallions were screwed by Lyft and Uber.

The guys who worked for the owners of medallions, not so much. It's actually a lot more accessible to get a car loan (Uber was even helping arrange them at one point, though I'm not sure it still does) than it was to buy a medallion and go into the taxi business, cheaper than leasing a medallion from an owner, and more independent than working for a taxi company. So the drivers switched away; to quote the Washington Post in 2014:

So, yeah, can the BS about drivers being hurt. Drivers-qua-drivers have a insecure working-class job driving for Uber and Lyft, but they were in insecure working-class jobs driving for the medallion owners, too. Heck, driving taxis is the job most likely to result in death by murder, and that's largely driven by robberies for the cash they carry, something Uber/Lyft drivers don't have to do.

1) This is one of the usual conceptual problems people have with understanding rulings in copyright law. A list of similarities that establish a work is infringing does not mean that no non-infrigning work can use any or some of those elements. It means that use of the totality of the list, under the circumstances of the case, constitutes an infringement. The moment you A) started highlighting specific isolated items, and B) put the reason for using those specific items in a new context (esports competition, rather than a commercial competitor for Tetris), you made the whole situation different.

I grant it's not immediately clear that a judge would hold a work that used just those specific points in an esports context to be non-infringing, but it is similarly not, in fact, clear it would be infringing. You'd need to get a copyright lawyer's judgment.

2) Actually plenty of ball sports do not hold field size constant. For example, the most popular one in the world, football as organized by FIFA, does not. Neither does Rugby Union or Rugby League. While basketball court sizes are standardized in the North American and world codes, they're standardized to different sizes, which seems to have little effect on NBA players in the Olympics. Though hockey is not technically a ball sport, NHL and international rinks are similarly not the same size, but NHL players similarly dominated in the Olympics. While infield dimensions are standardized in baseball, outfield dimensions of course vary widely, which is why every park needs its own "ground rules".

And perhaps most on-point, UFC specifically trademarked its octagonal ring to stop imitations. This worked for a while, until circumstances around the increasing popularity of the sport made it obvious that if the UFC didn't let other people use it, other organizations would jointly standardize on an alternative, isolating UFC. In order to avoid that, UFC made it generally available.

The TRIPS Agreement, which all 162 WTO member states are bound by, explicitly requires that plant varieties be protectable. There's no chance India is going to decide to quit the WTO.

Countries don't have to specifically use their patent system for plants; the UPOV Convention provides for a slightly different approach. One thing UPOV allows that patent regimes generally don't is for farmers to save their seed and grow again the next year (though selling it for other people to propagate is banned). But the existence of protection for the rights of developers of new plant breeds isn't going anywhere.

Yes, well, there are issues of artistic expression in the selection of visual elements. Xio made theirs look like Tetris down to the color choices. Just because your code doesn't infringe doesn't mean it's impossible to infringe otherwise. The judge's opinion in the case is a pretty good guide as to what to change to make a legal clone.

Seriously, people, The Magic Cauldron is twenty years old by now.

There's no flaw in the "open source model" being demonstrated here. There's simply the old flaw in the proprietary software model being shown, which is that somebody else can come along and develop a replacement for your proprietary bytes and then the profits you make from selling the proprietary bytes go away.

Sometimes your proprietary bytes get replaced by a proprietary rival (Visicalc -> 1-2-3 -> Excel), sometimes they get replaced by a proprietary clone (CP/M -> DOS), sometimes they get replaced by a de novo open-source software project (BitKeeper -> Git), sometimes they get replaced by someone taking open source code used in the proprietary product and building a fully-open derivative (Unix -> FreeBSD).

But the flaw here isn't with "the open source model", because Elastic's model isn't open source, it's the selling of access to proprietary bytes.

Elastic is a proprietary software developer which happens to distribute some open source software as a come-on to attract customers for their proprietary products.

Now someone (and why should anyone care who?) is attempting to replace their proprietary software with an actual open source solution, code available on GitHub.

Elastic is accordingly bleating about it just like SCO bleated about big companies supporting an open source rival to their proprietary product. And they deserve the exact same same sympathy as SCO deserved.

There, fixed that headline for you.