If by "lifting" you mean stealing, then you are not talking about anything resembling the patent law.

This is irrelevant to my argument, as I am saying that technology has no impact on patentability. It does, of course, affect the patent.

Yeah they do. How? With an algorithm that takes this and gives you that. In short, with a computer. Any software that can do the same is, well, functionally the same. It is entirely consistent that we cannot write around patents, and so the problem is with their very existence. They just do more harm when it comes to software, since the latter is almost always built on top of the older software, and even a "simple" by today's standards program can have thousands of patentable algorithms in it. The kind of harm they do is the same, though, regardless of the technology involved: innovation is taxed or prevented, monopolies distort the free market, and our freedom of expression is abridged.

I'd expect this much if anything. SCOTUS cannot fix the software patents. It is not even clear what a "software patent" is. IANAL, but the way I understand the patent law, there is absolutely no difference. If you have a gizmo that does A, B, and C, then you can patent it, and how exactly it meets these claims in terms of technology is irrelevant. The patent law itself is oppressive: it infringes on our right to free expression, while providing no discernible benefit to the public. Only the lawmakers can fix this clusterfuck, and they can do so trivially, by gradually shrinking the protection term, giving the manufacturers some time to adapt. But they, of course, lack the will to do so, since they respect the opinions of plutocrats way more than those of the general public.

RMS also advocates a way to get to the same goal in discrete steps, by making patents unenforceable in certain fields (like the medical field or the general purpose computing field). The precedents exist: the surgeons are allowed to ignore patents while curing people. This is much better than defining "software patents" within the law, since any such definition will probably be circumvented by technological means. Rent-seekers could simply inject enough non-software payload into a device and patent it anyway.

No, this is not enough. Not if you want an optimal level of privacy and security. If the software is open-source but non-free, then you can fix it all you want, but you cannot share your fix with others. So this is as good as closed source for almost everyone, including you, since you cannot fix all the bugs by yourself.

Meh. The law affects a person's mobility to a far greater extent than any EMP gizmo. The police already can stop almost any car by shooting the driver in the head. This only gives them an ability to stop most cars in a more safe way. Having the right to go anywhere as a free person, and being able to do so in a vehicle powered by free software is far more crucial.

This. But the problem, as I see it, is not with people designing poor passwords. The password authentication itself is the problem. One basic issue is that passwords, ostensibly, authenticate a person, but in practice they do not. It is the computer that gets the direct access, not a person, so we could as well be consistent and have a procedure designed to authenticate a person+computer pair. And that leads us to a much more secure way to authenticate: using the strong encryption, either symmetric or asymmetric. Arguably, this is also easier on the human user! Instead of remembering hundreds of weak passwords, many of which are identical, one can simply outsource this whole thing to a piece of trusted, secure hardware. Let the computer generate and remember the public/private key pairs (asymmetric) and the shared secrets (symmetric), and to use them automagically. Given a properly secured cyber-brain (a private, wearable computer with absolutely no remote control of any kind), stealing the keys remotely is impossible, even if they are kept unencrypted. The only practical way to get them is to steal the actual hardware, which is prohibitively expensive for most kinds of illegal activities.

The biggest benefit to the user, IMHO, is the simplicity of the security protocol. Keep your cyber-brain and its backups physically secure. End of story. Even the dumbest of people can do this much for their wallets today.

Their FAQ says the following about why safeplug is secure:

Oh, wait, it doesn't say anything. No description of the software, no developer access, "activation"? WTF is that? This is just another spy box, folks, just like your cellphone and your self-encrypting storage unit.

The government should only use free software, by law, so that we don't have to check. And it should definitely only serve free software to users (if it makes a Web app), which we can check just fine.

The platform you speak of is called "the Internet". Buy cheap hosting and post whatever you want. If your Wikipedia edits keep getting reverted, there's probably a good reason for it, likely having to do with editing guidelines, most likely with NPoV.

I do not believe I am taking it to the extreme. Software vendors that sell us cat in a bag are the ones taking it to the extreme--in their case, of douchebaggery.

Notice that my argument above is not concerned with art in general, but since you bring it up, let me tear into that. You are talking about a game, and I'll assume that it's a work designed for pure entertainment. (An educational game, even when it includes expensive art, can and should be developed on taxpayer money, and should be free because all education should be free (as in freedom).) And with this kind of art, we have a major difference from the software as usually understood: its value is entirely subjective, and if it is not available, then any other kind of art can be used to duplicate its function, which is to merely entertain. Forget art even. One can pet a cat or stare into the fire or smoke something, and be just as entertained as by any video game out there. So what you seem to be saying is, let's give everyone censorship powers, so that they can sell them to capitalists in mass, so that capitalists can sue anyone who dares to compete with them in the market, all of that just so that we can have a CERTAIN KIND of entertainment? Like $50 million movies and games, I mean? IMHO, this is a TERRIBLE deal for us, both as consumers and as citizens. It is not even clear that big-budget titles would disappear in the absence of copyright. Some game designers are already collecting donations for non-free games, and are successful. If anything, people would be more willing to support a free project, so I fail to see what we have to gain by keeping up the censorship and the intellectual monopolies that come with it.

Um... Professional actors who want to monetize notoriety should be happy every time people talk about them, let alone share clips of them to get their friends addicted as well. The more famous and well-known they are, the more opportunity they have to make a buck. They absolutely do not need any censorship powers.

Here I agree wholeheartedly: everyone should have the right to be credited appropriately. This is the only restriction a copyright law should be able to enforce. If the only requirement for re-distribution of a creative work is to provide a correct credit, then it cannot be considered censorship for any practical purposes. This right, I think, should be protected about as much as the current copyright lasts: lifetime and a half of the author or so. All other restrictions on re-distribution have to go. To say it in a different way, the only license a copyright should be able to enforce is the BSD-like license. Copyleft wouldn't hurt, but it wouldn't be needed either, as it's basically just a middle finger for the scammers who would build on free software, but refuse to share. Copyleft serves its purpose well, but educating the consumers about the nasty nature of non-free software to the point where they start boycotting it for rational and/or selfish reasons would work even better.

And more to the point: I will fully trust the online tax software if it's free (libre), secure against eavesdroppers, and operated by the tax-collecting government agency itself.

From my anecdotal observations, it has been a long-standing effort in the free software community to de-emphasize the monetary impact and to bring to the front the political impact. While I don't consider it a mistake, I also think that there is absolutely no shame in bringing economic factors into view.

The final test would be to do an actual TCO study, which is very hard to do, given that most programs are just too different in their free and non-free incarnations. For example, libreoffice is not a free version of M$ Office: it has different features, different requirements, different compatibility relation with other software, and different uses. On the organizational level we find that a typical company uses many pieces of software, some of them free and others non-free, and they all work with each other in some way, and none can be easily swapped out with a free or non-free alternative.

All of these issues can be overcome, however, and in the meanwhile, it is easy to argue that we should expect free software to be cheaper (in TCO terms) than non-free software.

The development should come out to be cheaper, feature for feature. There are many ways in which the cost of developing non-free software balloons with no benefit to the users.

First, non-free software vendors are constantly tempted to develop "anti-features" (they call them features, of course, but they are basically malware). The most successful of them do it with probability close to 100%. They have teams of people dedicated to reducing functionality (for example, tiered OS offerings), breaking compatibility (even with their own older software) to force upgrade, and inserting spyware. Last but not least, they have people whose only purpose is to make software "sexy", so that it can be sold to chaps, even though it is stuffed with malware. Enter graphical interface over-design and marketing expenses. All of this takes real money out of the development budget, and sooner or later the costs are passed on to the users.

Second, they treat the source code as a trade secret, and consequently have to spend money to provide a fitting level of security, starting with physical access to the production hardware, and ending with checking one's credentials every time the code is accessed. As non-free software projects get bigger, they have to take the trust factor into account, so they prevent most programmers from accessing most of the code. They introduce even more expensive access control at this point, and most of their programmers are less efficient than they could have been, because they are prevented from understanding how the software works. And the debugging has to be done in the house: unlike free software projects, they are unable to crowd-source it, which would allow to shift some of the cost onto the early adopters and volunteers.

Third, we don't have to limit ourselves to just the direct cost of developing the software. What about the cost of educating the very programmers who develop the software? These people expect to be paid enough to match the investment they've made into education, so reducing the cost of educating programmers should lower the TCO as well. The impact is hard to quantify here, but I am willing to bet that making people understand how a free OS works (understand it enough to write great software for it) is cheaper than making them understand how a non-free OS works. Why would we expect anything else when non-free vendors spend money to prevent free education? As the guardians of the trade secrets, they have the de facto monopoly on "teaching" people how to write around their dumb OS. So we should expect them to charge the monopoly prices. Compare it with a free OS situation, where you can go to the free market and find thousands upon thousands of people who understand how a free OS works, all in competition for your educational dollar.

Want a feature added? Why would you expect a monopolist developer to do it cheaper?

Want to transition away from a piece of software or to replace it with a counterpart? Why would you expect a non-free software vendor not to write anti-features specifically designed to make this as painful and costly as possible?

This list just goes on. And what do we have on the other side of this scale? Where exactly do we waste money when we develop free software? May be I am just lacking imagination, but I really cannot point out a single factor that makes non-free software cheaper to develop feature for feature. And once again, this rant should not be taken as a claim that free software is cheaper. I am arguing that it should be cheaper for many very good reasons, and that a careful statistical study is urgently needed to drive this point home. Freedom is great, but a simple consumer advocacy argument cannot possibly hurt. All non-free software is a rip-off and a scam, and I am convinced we should be able to prove it.

I don't think "resemble" means what you think it means. But then may be you do, Anonymous Coward.

I can't shake off a feeling that the law enforcement and friendly news sources are using "Anonymous" as a boogeyman. When I see "Anonymous collective has hacked their systems", I read "Their systems were hacked. FBI has no leads". The law enforcement has finally found a perfect line for every situation where they demonstrate incompetence, since "anonymous" turns into "Anonymous" so easily.

This. Insurance companies are NOT interested in making us drive safer, and when they say they are, they are lying. The more accidents we have, the more work volume they have, the bigger they are, end of story. If we crash more on average, they will obviously fix it by raising our premiums. So they don't pay per crash: they make money per crash. They get paid every time they process a claim or conduct an investigation.

By reducing their work volume, they will actually reduce insurance-related revenue if they make us drive safer. So why are they pushing this? So that they can spy on drivers and monetize what they record. IMHO, this is the most reasonable explanation for their motives. The careful drivers who are spied on will save on their premiums, but will have to say bye-bye to privacy inside their own vehicle. Their information will be sold left and right, and we can rest assured they will be ripped off somewhere else, by someone who purchased their private info to either brainwash them with ads, or to trick them into a bad deal.