I think the biggest threat is indeed somebody figuring this out as a business model. You could build a whole company around using various data breeches (+ publicly available data) on social networking sites to build entire profiles on people. Then companies pay you to screen their applicants for you. Banks use it to "adjust" credit ratings. Insurance companies use it to decide who to cover, and who to deny coverage.

The problem of privacy is not keeping the data from getting out there, it is keeping the data from being gathered and used in the wrong context.

I think this would be illegal in the EU of course, not so sure about the US.

If most people agree that an electronics product should last for at least 2 years, then what possible point would there be in "letting the free market decide"?

I was going to comment, many of the print magazines in Europe are very good. But the stuff I gravitate to online is usually American.

I'm just gonna ignore most of your comment and point out that whatever you may think of the French healthcare system, it's *still* cheaper than the American one.

If we would truly negotiate for and license every single patent major software products violate, the software industry would grind to a halt. The patent system is ill-suited for the software industry as a whole. And from all possible ways to handle software patents, the US in particular has chosen about the worst one.

Software patents shouldn't exist in the first place, is what I was getting at.

At the very least, litigation is costing major software companies more than they are actually gaining from licensing. We do have something to compare to btw, an entire software industry with much less patent proliferation up until the early 80s.

But we can also ask ourselves: how many software patents really apply to inventions that would otherwise would not have been worth coming up with? You think nobody would've gone through the trouble of coming up with MP3 had software patents not existed? Software design is not the same as drug design, and simply shouldn't be judged under the same rules.

Patents are not there to make you rich. They're there to promote innovation. They're clearly not necessary, and so most likely to be an impediment instead. Which studies do back up, no matter what you seem to think.

Splitting hairs here. Nobody can afford to pay licenses for software patents. Any one sufficiently large piece of software is covered by tens or hundreds or patents. The only way you can afford to license them all, is if you're prepared to publish at a loss.

Whether it is obvious or not is beside the point. I can guarantee you that it didn't take months to develop, since Carmack had a game engine to write and economical incentive not to spend half of his development time on a single light performance improvement. This is always the problem of software patents: 99% of the time, coming up with the 'invention' was cheaper than the actual process of getting the patent. And in the remaining 1%, somebody had an economic incentive to come up with the solution anyway (the one thing patents are supposed to be there to encourage).

They demonstrably (seriously, there have been studies) slow down invention in the software space. So why put up with them?

Those comments at the press conference were made by Bernardo De Bernardinis, a government official. The meeting between the scientists was also not open to the public. You're probably aware of this but your retelling of the story makes it sound like the seismologists were directly involved, while apparently only one of them was even at the press conference, which was held before the scientific meeting.

It sounds to me like a pretty clear-cut case against De Bernardinis, but as I read it the seismologists were unwitting (and unwilling) accomplices.

2015 sounds ridiculously close, but I can imagine "assisted" driving systems becoming popular by then. Say, sensors that detect when you're about to rear-end the car in front of you and slam the brakes for you (with a much better chance of avoiding accident due to reaction times). Stuff like this will slowly start to automate our driving experience. 30% driverless by 2015 though? That would require some mad acceleration in research.

Politicians expect universities to supplement their grants by attempting to commercialise research, usually in the form of some sort of public/private partnership (either an existing player or more roundabout by establishing new spin-offs). This includes applying for patents etc.

It would be nice if all that research could be freely available to everyone, but that'd mean greatly increasing the science budget, whereas most politicians seem to think it's the first place they should look for cuts. This is what you get when you vote for small (US) or efficient (EU) government.

This is just ridiculous. Evolution sounds convincing to you, so you accept it, but man-made global warming does not, so you do not. That's certainly one way to look at the world, but it's not a very sensible one. There are only two logical options here: you either accept what the experts say, or you become one yourself. You're clearly not interested in doing either so here's a third way: just shut up because you have no idea what you're talking about.

That was the first thing I thought. Sounds like anti gaming addiction state propaganda to me.

Your #1 and #2 are a bit contradictory. I've just opened 400 tabs in Chrome. what was it supposed to prove? (haven't tried Opera, but then I prefer browsers with render engines that actually work)

I'll guess that it's probably tied to the +1 button and the same principle as facebook's like button (i.e. allows google to show you how many of your friends have +1'd the article, while conveniently giving them data on every visitor that visits any page with a +1 button on it).

I'm pretty sure we're talking about two different bumps in food price inflation. AFAIK the latest bump (the one that caused the arab spring) is not driven in such a large part by biofuels. I might be wrong of course but the fact of the matter is that the EU has already changed its policies, and it was one of the main drivers behind the demand spike.

Anyway the article is obviously crap and I doubt food is really the problem. Sure, food prices jumped and will remain high, but there's nothing to suggest we can't feed the 9 billion people we're apparently going to max out at. The problem is that our energy budget just isn't big enough for the kind of living standards that everyone is aspiring to. Those that say we need to limit economic growth to solve that issue though, are completely misunderstanding what economic growth entails.

Because most slashdotters are not much smarter than Thomas Friedman, so they can't tell the bullshit from the real thing.