Certainly relaxing some of the rules could have helped a lot, 7 or 8 years ago.
I still tool around superuser.com, but over the last 10 years its become a husk of its former self, with fewer and fewer multi-visit users every year, because everyone has a horrible first experience navigating the strict terms of service for the site and the remaining overzealous userbase.
Now, its probably far to late to do much about it.

Please keep in mind, I'm not saying that IPv6 or its larger namespace is ludicrous; I'm saying that the TFA's assertion that the problem with IPv6 is a lack of additional features is. It is not the lack of new features that has hindered adoption. But that aside, pinging a 128-bit address (that you have somehow memorized) while trying to troubleshoot why your DNS server isn't resolving names at the moment or then trying to ssh into that machine to reboot it while there are no naming services working your network IS a pretty good example of why no one wants IPv6.

This whole premise is ludicrous. IPv6 adoption hasn't taken off as expected, not because of a lack of new features; new features would not convince me to use it. The issue with IPv6 is that its scale is not "human-sized". Its the same issue as Metric time; even in societies that have largely adopted the metric system, no one is going to tell time based on the number of seconds since the birth of the universe.... its simply not sized correctly for humans.

Well, you see they did try to improve it. With NZBs. They brought about a rebirth for Usenet, albeit supporting a different culture (file sharers). Unfortunately that brought forth the wrath of BRIEN, and to be honest, NNTP just isn't sufficiently robust against adversaries determined to delete/take-down its content..

Usenet is to NNTP as WWW is to HTTP+DNS.

All else aside, we cannot allow Carte-Blanche for the reason tucked neatly into this sentence:

No matter how much emphasis we place on extra serious crimes like actual terrorism, high-level drug trafficking, and running global networks for child porn, The actual and prevalent use of the technology will be trivial matters like traffic accidents, failing to pick up after your dog, minor curfew violations, etc.

One years protection is definitely an improvement, but its still philosophically antithetical to the reason for patents to exist in the first place. Copyright should be sufficient protection, to keep people from stealing your code, but Software Patents protect the very idea, regardless of the means used to obtain it, in a way that physical patents do not.

Patents are designed to spur innovation by getting companies to share their secrets, so that a valuable portfolio of useful arts and sciences is built in the public domain (paraphrased from the Constitution Article 1). In return for sharing their secrets, the company is granted a limited exclusivity on the patented machine for a limited period of time designed such that the invention is still valuable after the exclusivity expires. Thats our first problem: Most software inventions are only good for about 5 years, which is less than copyright term. In that regard your proposal is spot on.

The bigger problem is however, that a patent on a machine makes only reasonably abstract claims, and the construction of the device must be reasonably concrete, meaning that substantially changing the design of the machine produces a new non-infringing product, even if the two devices perform the same task. Software patents however, are very very abstract, such that any means anyone could ever develop to perform a task that someone has patented an approach to, despite using a dramatically different approach, or developed without knowledge of the existing patent, is supposedly infringing. This is starkly different from Copyright, in that you generally have to know you are making an action that might infringe a copyright, by consuming an existing artefact.

Lastly, because Software Patents are so abstract (as opposed to patents on a physical machine or pharmaceutical) that when the exclusivity period is over, the secrets the inventor shared with the government are useless for further innovation in the public domain. This undercuts the entire purpose of Patents as described in the US Constitution, and only serves to promote anti-competitive practices for the companies profit.

Ultimately, there is no fix, that can make software patents work, unless every method in the algorithm is stated in the patent, such that you can create non-infringing approaches to achieve the same goal, which do not infringe, and so that the invention has worth to the public domain after exclusivity expires.

Thats not actually true, When RAMBUS ambushed everyone with the patented technologies they snuck into the JEDEC DDR2 specification, They were ordered to accept FRAND licensing as a result. http://patent-damages.com/2013...

True, but DASH is a standard, so the use of a patented technology in that standard requires FRAND, which the courts will adjudicate, as proven by Motorola v Microsoft.

If they did, they would just have a court declare the technology standards-essential, and make licensing compulsory under so-called FRAND terms: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

No, what we need is an abolishment on Software Patents, so that armed thugs like the MPEGLA can't extort licensing fees from a developer because the code they wrote on their own happens to do something that is abstractly claimed in some random poor quality patent.

Whoever considered outsourcing your espionage work to the very people you are spying on? Genius!

The Chinese have this outsourcing thing down from multiple angles.

see, I was thinking about X-Files: Fight the Future

In the end, this data will only be used to restrict care by algorithm, saving insurance company profits, at the expense of those lives which were statistically 'inconvenient'. Only with a single payer system could this achieve the ends Mr Page cites. My guess is far more than 100K lives will be lost in persuit of this new profit.

that is simply not true.