econgeeker

You think property rights don't exist elsewhere? The only "free lunch" is the one paid for with stolen money, e.g.: taxes.

The rich are leaving and renouncing. There are a lot of countries out there, and many of them provide a more hospitable climate for wealth.

The rich are moving, and there's quite an exodus going on. I'm part of it.

Of course it is harder for the super-rich. The US government is not going to let you leave the country with a $5B fortune.

As a mental exercise, consider the thought process behind the perspective that this is "anti-competitive".

1. Apple has taken a technology- metal milling- that has existed for at least half a century, and used it to make a nicer laptop case.

2. Apple uses the modern manufacturing method to do this, requiring expensive CNC machines.

3. Apple introduced popular products that, when you open them, look like they were hand crafted by master metalworkers in the 1940s (I'm serious!) while their competition is still shipping cheap plastic cases.

4. Even though there are dozens of suppliers of CNC Mills of all type, Apple's requirements contain the market for a particular type (this is speculation on my, and the articles part.)

5. Therefore, this is "anti-competitive" because Apple's competition can't just copy the unibody case idea and order machines and make their own unibody cases?

6. So, what could possibly be the remedy? To fine Apple for being successful with an innovative new case design? To institute some government board of allocation to allocate the (currently, and only temporarily) limited supply of CNC machines?

If Apple hadn't been competitive-- that is, if Apple hadn't innovated and come up with a new case design-- there would be no demand for these machines from non-Apple people. So, this is a result of competition on Apple's part.

Sometimes I imagine that people think that if Apple is successful by doing something better, that this is "unfair" and that Apple should be punished.

Hell, I wish I could make a crapy video editor and then force Apple to give me some of their final cut profits, because, really, it is so unfair that apple makes such a good video editor, I'm just one guy and I can't hope to compete with that, right? (Just kidding, forcing Apple to do that is aggression, and is immoral. I'm just being illustrative. While I've thought about making a video editing app, I've not done that, actually.)

Well, I am suspicious about an article that talks about lathes with regard to making Macbook parts. A Lathe is a machine on which parts are spun at great speed. It is good for making things like the legs of tables, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lathe

Apple's unibody technology uses CNC machines which are more appropriately called mills. They are not that uncommon, and are widely available to everybody... and have been for years. Maybe Apple uses machines from a particular segment of the market that has dried up supply, but it is rare that a company has too much demand for a product and isn't interested in building more.

EG: There's no evidence Apple has cornered the market on CNC machines, which can come from a wide variety of companies.

However, companies like Foxconn, do invest billions in buying large quantities of such tools and then dedicate them to manufacturing apple products, because Apple's specifications require them to do so. (This from an article I read interviewing Foxcon's founder.) The Band on the iPhone 4 required 1,000 custom metal machines, for instance. No doubt many of those billions invested in those machines come from Apple.

Good Point.

For instance, New Zealand. Nice place. Great People. First class quality of life-- better than the USA. Higher taxes than the USA in many ways, but the government is so much less corrupt that the taxes are much less of a burden. You don't mind paying when you see you're getting value for the money.

There are many places an american can go. Unlike the USA, most countries don't tax your worldwide income. So, for instance, you could become a citizen of any of the EU countries that don't tax worldwide income, and earn your income outside that country tax free (and live outside it as well.)

I know of several countries within the EU where you can be a citizen and pay essentially no taxes, or extremely low taxes. These are very pleasant places as well. For instance, one location is the side of a very nice lake in switzerland (Campoin d' Italia) and Andorra has some nice tax advantages, and one of the best climates in Europe. Monaco is not bad, though expensive for my tastes, while Licthenstein, Austria, Switzerland, and all this british islands whose existence is for purposes of avoiding taxes aren't too bad either.

The idea that you can't have a high quality of life in China or India compared to the USA seems silly to me, but I haven't lived in either of those countries. There are many countries in Latin, South America, Asia and Europe where you can have as high a quality of life as the USA, or higher, and at much less cost than the USA.

I think the idea that anywhere desirable is worse than the USA is a kind of parochial perception. Of course ones preferences can vary, but, for instance, in many ways much of eastern europe is nicer than the USA, even though they are "poorer". There are many countries that are in many ways richer, or where you can have a better quality of life at the same or less cost.

I just think that people in every country believe that their country s superior to others, and can't imagine how anyone would want to live in another country... but they also haven't experienced those other countries.

I've visited a lot of countries, and have yet to visit one that was terrible, and about %50 of them are better than the USA in noticeable ways, and the ones that aren't as good, aren't as good in ways that aren't really all that bad.

That's the number of people who renounced. And that number is going up dramatically, and I've heard that the published figures for renouncement are way under-reported. (as in here are lawyers who have more clients who have renounced than the government claims renounced in total.) But on both sides these are just claims.

The number of people who simply moved their butts and their assets overseas is much higher. You can tell this is the case because the administration has been saber rattling for the last four years, and starting to work their way into currency controls.

Did you know, in order to renounce, you have to get the permission of the government? They charge an exit tax too for your funds. This is a currency control and it is one of the things that marked the soviet union as a bad regime. If you can't move your money in and out of a country, then you're not likely to invest in that country.

I'm not very rich, and I will renounce as soon as my second citizenship gets in. It will be easier for me because, not being very rich yet, I will be more likely to get permission of the government to give up my citizenship.

Gold was criminalized for use in transactions in 1933 by executive order. I think that's a fair point to mark the end of the "gold standard" and the beginning of the fiat era. It is true the US government would redeem dollars for gold for foreign countries up to 1970 or so, under Nixon... but indie the USA, it was a crime to use gold as money. (Though jewelry was allowed) up until the 1970s.

He's using the term "counterfeiting" in the economic sense.

One of the things that makes something money in economics is that it is difficult to duplicate, so you can't just make more of it for yourself. Fiat currency doesn't have that restraint. So, we can say it is not money, or we can say that it is being counterfeited. This is not a word chosen for its alarm value, though it should make you alarmed.

Taking twitter for example, it is rendering content in a native app when you're looking at tweets. The content is delivered in json (or whatever) standard format and rendered in native controls, namely tableViewCells. Webkit is used if you look at a web page... but otherwise it is native.

The flexibility and quality you get by taking web "content" via json (rather than HTML) and rendering it natively is a huge win.

I don't see android customers paying for websites wrapped in an app anymore than I see iOS users paying for it, actually less.

Of course if you're making SaaS such as base camp then you can do native clients on either platform.... and sell them successfully... while selling a specialized web browser (That just gives you the base camp website in WebKit) wouldn't likely fly.

The pain of doing web development for a maze of twisty browsers, all alike and incompatible makes iOS a "superior" choice in the sense that it means less headaches.

For me, it doesn't really matter which is easier or harder, but which has the best return on invested pain.

I am working on some solutions to get web pain down for our particular area of the industry, and as a result, I think the web may have a positive return on the amount of pain it causes. (FWIW, of course iOS has pain too, everything does, just using this as a measure of the relative joy vs. hassle of doing what's needed for business reasons, vs. hassle of having to deal with painful technologies metric.)

All good reasons. My reasons are:

-- The Apple frameworks are first class. In the past 20 years, there has never been a set of GUI frameworks that I've seen that was anywhere near as good as things are in iOS right now. (I've not looked at android, but it being based on Java doesn't fill me with hope. A lot of what makes CocoaTouch work so well is due to Objective-C.)

-- You can write an app once and have it run on iOS on the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad. This is really great. No phone outsells the iPhone, no tablet outsells the iPad, and there doesn't seem to be any competition for the iPod touch. This means "cross platform" or, across the spectrum development is really easy. In fact, with some tools you can include Mac OS X in the mix, though it isn't as trivial as doing an "iPad Port".

-- The above means that you have the largest addressable market for your software. It is true that this market is also the one that is more likely to buy software. But, while people talk about android as a "platform" it really isn't, from the developers point of view. Android ships on phones with keyboards, and much of its volume is on phones that really are just feature phones that can run apps. IOW, they are low end cheap phones sold for little, or given away for free to people who use them only to make calls and whose design is such that you can't really do a modern iPhone style touch app for them. Or if you can, it involves a lot of porting. IF the phone doesn't have a touchscreen, it doesn't matter if it's android or not, you have to do another port.

-- Apple has proven to be a trustworthy partner. People like to complain about Apple and make them out like they don't treat developers well, but they really do. All of the reviews (and the one rejection) from the Appstore review team have been fair. Apple pays on time and reliably. Apple sells software world wide and supports addressing a worldwide market easily. Apple's terms are consistent and they keep expanding and improving their market. As someone whose business is selling (rather than writing, though I do all of our development, the software is worthless if it isn't sold) having a good market is really critical to success.

-- The consistency of the platform means that we can have free apps or very low cost apps and not be buried in support requests. I think this is really underestimated. On other platforms, either you're ignoring the customers, or you're dealing with innumerable bugs that show up on a particular model of device. You don't have that fragmentation or variation on the iOS platform, and you can therefore afford to do real customer support.... though most customers contacting us are telling us how much they love our apps rather than complaining about problems.

-- Apple keeps giving us really news stuff to play with. They don't have fundamental problems they have to address (like androids fragmentation) and when they do give us something where they're behind (like iCloud) when they deliver it is generally a first class implementation. I'd wish there was more sample code for iCloud but they took their time and did it right, and I appreciate that.

Of all the platforms I've developed for this has been the best so far. So, while there might be some financial advantage to developing for android as well, I don't really see it.

Here's the costs that keep me off of android:

-- Maintaining separate port of our software would be too much. One set of source code for all platforms keeps us working on new features and moving the ball forward, not maintaining a another code base.

-- As I mentioned, we'll be able to add Mac OS X to our single code base, and that's nice. Where we're likely to have to do a separate port is the web. I'm much more interested in doing a web app for our customers, because then I can point everyone to it-- android users, palm users, windows phone 7 system home plus users, etc. If I'm going to support an incompatible platform, its going to be the web.

-- Java. Frankly, at one time Java was my favorite language... but having worked with Objective-C, erlang and other languages, I've grown to hate it. It is ... bureaucratic, for lack of a better term. Like nails on a chalkboard now.

-- I don't see the market there for apps. The quality of the market in which we'd sell, and the quality of the customers doesn't seem like it would produce a worthwhile return on our investment. Sure, angry birds can do well, but that's a different kind of situation, that app is a phenomenon.

The only reason to not team up with Microsoft, et. al, is if google wanted to use the patents against them. If google simply wanted to be immune to claims from the Novell patents, they could have joined the group and saved money (vs. bidding by themselves against the group.)

Further, you make two assertions here: "MS teamed up with Google's competitors to bully them with bullshit patents. "

You haven't shown that MSFT has bullied google, nor that the patents are "bullshit".

If the patents are bogus, they would be easy to dispatch in court with prior art.

Is it really covert? In the case of the Nortel bids, the bidders were getting government approval before bidding, and it was made public after the fact who was in the groups.

I'm not sure that removing anonymity from bidders is a good thing or not. I mean, if you know who the other bidders are, that would affect your strategy, removing some purity from the auction process, wouldn't it?

But, maybe you feel I'm sidestepping your real issue, so let me make another point: In any situation where companies might collude like this, they're effectively creating a cartel. Say, in the case of the employee salaries that you mention.

The problem with a cartel is that there is always an incentive for a member of the cartel to violate the agreement. For instance, if MSFT, Apple, Facebook and Google agreed to cap software developer salaries, then Google (or one of the others) has an incentive to secretly violate that agreement to get the best employees, right?

Pretty soon the cartel falls apart, or the agreement has no effect. The stronger the agreement, the more incentive there is to violate it.

Further, imagine if they were successful and kept salaries below a market rate-- this would give a huge boost to any of their competitors who were willing to pay market rates, right?

They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot by doing so, driving the best employees to other companies.

This is why cartels don't really work, or at least aren't sustainable for very long.

I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process.

If you consider android innovative, then the patent process saved google the 7+ years Apple spent developing the iPhone and allowed them to get to the market much quicker with a touch screen phone (they'd been previously working on a blackberry style OS for android.)

I am the inventor of two software patents. One of which involved solving the visual glitches that appear in online games due to the high latency of playing over a modem. This patent involved a lot of timing issues, and was pretty narrow.

However it was claimed on slashdot that we "patented the idea of online gaming!!!!"

Later, in a discussion list, they claimed we'd patented the idea of IRC!

People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

In the case of the patents I've been involved in, that is not what has happened. In fact, the portrayal of what was covered by the patent didn't match the patent at all, and it is clear that the people putting forward those patents as examples of bad patents were, frankly misrepresenting them.

Every time I've seen a bogus patent claim and actually read the patent, I've found this to be the case as well. (I don't remember the linked-list example, so haven't read that particular one.)

I'm not saying that bogus patents don't exist. I'm sure you can get things by the examiner.

But the system has a solution for this-- if your patent is bogus then it won't stand up in court. If prior art exists, then you run the risk of spending a lot of money, only to have the patent nullified when someone presents prior art. (And I mean real prior art, not the kind of stuff that people claim is prior art, like the claim that IRC is prior art for solving clock jitter in 3D online games)

The patent system, as with anything else that relies on the meager US court system, is expensive... but there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed.

Google is certainly capable, both financially and intellectually, of getting a bogus patent thrown out. There's no reason they should be calling on the federal government to intervene with a political "solution" on their behalf... unless they know that there isn't actually prior art and the patents are, in fact, legitimate.

In fact, I think googles call for reform is an admission that the patents aren't bogus after all.

Edit: I didn't change the text above, but want to clarify- I'm responsible for some claims on one of these patents, though not named as an inventor (I didn't realize the significance at the time.) For the other I am the sole inventor, but it hasn't been brought forth as "bogus" in a public forum yet, though, for those who don't read it carefully, they could easily make the claim. This is why I'm being vague about the specific patents. Previous experience on Hacker News tells me that if I wasn't vague the topic would turn to how those patents are so obviously "bogus" (to people who haven't read more than the headline)... and well, frankly my name is on them. I really don't to be discriminated against in business for having a pr-intellectual property position. The current climate makes that fear seem pretty legitimate.

The email makes it pretty clear: http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/08/03/microsoft.says...

You're confusing the Nortel and Novell bids. MSFT invited Google to join the group bidding on the Novell patents. The email I saw was an invitation to talk about joining, which Google refused, not a proposal of any specific terms.

Generally, it would be silly to expect Google to join a group and pay part of the bid, and not get a right to the patents, or have them encumbered. And at the same time, joining a group like this would by definition be cheaper than bidding against the group.

So, the only reason for Google to refuse to talk about joining the group to bid on the Novell patents would be if google was planning to use them against the group, if it won them.

It was an offer to talk, not terms, as is made clear in the email. Your point is lying dead in a ditch.

Google is talking about both, and google refused to even TALK to microsoft about joining one of the groups bidding on patents that google is now complaining about.

The claim that this is MSFT PR spin is based on the presumption that MSFT offered google bad terms, but the email makes it clear they were proposing talking about joining the group-- there were no terms yet.

Plus its pretty much impossible for there to have been bad terms. This is why competitors like Apple and RIMM can join the same group. If google wasn't going to get what they want out of the deal there would be no incentive to contribute.

Joining a group and paying a fraction of the bid is always cheaper than bidding against that same group and having to pay the whole bid.

The only reason you wouldn't want to join such a group is if you wanted to use the patents offensively.

Two points: 1) Apple has never sued google, to my knowledge, and there are no active lawsuits currently. I'm not aware of any suits from Microsoft either. 2) IF Apple were to sue google, it would be over Patents resulting from Apple developed technology, not patents Apple bought defensively.

I'm unaware of any case of Apple suing a company for violating a patent that Apple bought. However, Apple does sue companies for violating patents on Apple's inventions. Apple is not a patent troll, they are simply protecting their inventions.

If Google had chosen to enter the bidding, the terms of the agreement could easily have included a cross-licensing deal, as these are how these things are often done.

In fact, entering the bidding with these companies would have been the cheapest and most effective way to neutralize any claim they might have had on Google over these patents.

If Google had entered the group they would have gotten a license on them (why else would google contribute to the bid?) and the cost of that would have been less than bidding for the whole thing by itself, by definition.

I think google wanted the whole thing for itself, in the case of Nortel, and lost, and is now crying foul because it didn't get its way in an auction it didn't take very seriously in the first place.

You're in error.

This was MSFT offering for google to talk about joining in the bidding. Google turned them down without knowing what the terms were, because the terms hadn't even been discussed. This was an offer to talk, not an offer of terms.

Google has been caught with its senior counsel telling a blatant lie, in public. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see people trying to spin it so hard...

"Software developers, and Open Source developers in particular, have been adamantly against software patents for a very long time."

This is exactly as true as the claim that all scientists support AGW theory.

Reality-- most scientists don't support that theory.

But proponents of the theory say that they all do, all over the place. And since there is nobody who actually speaks for all scientists, there's nobody to prove them wrong.

So they repeat it over and over and over and over again, even though it isn't true.

Logically, your statement is easily disproven. I have been developing software for two decades, including open source, and I support software patents.

Now you can never make that statement again. Well, you can't if you're honest.

In order to patent something, you have to reduce it to practice. That is to say, you have to actually make it work, in the real world.

That Stephen Spielburg was able to do it with computer graphics has no bearing on the validity of someone making it exist in the real world.

The reason I am hesitant to debate this issue is because, as you have amply demonstrated, the anti-patent people often don't even understand what a patent IS, let alone what is relevant as "prior art", and are so exceedingly hostile, and often, quite frankly dishonest (e.g.: you'd have to understand what a patent is in order to understand the multi-touch patents.) that it is just a waste of time.

Literally, I am tired offending the trolls. There is nothing to debate, because I've made my case, and you're just going to object and object and object and find another movie to reference and be proud (rather than humiliated!) at doing so!

Right, you can't argue the facts so just be disparaging. The Microsoft Surface came out in 2008, not "years" before Apple showed the iPhone.

You're absolutely uninformed about even the basic facts or timeline, yet you're happy to make broad assertions and engage in attacks to the person. Well, where I come from, that means you lost buddy, and I have no further need to rebut you.

Have a nice day!

Neither of those are prior art. I suggest you read the foundational patents, and if you're not familiar with the terms of art, get up to speed on it, and then look into whatever you think might be "prior art" very carefully.

If you do, you'll find that there is no prior art, otherwise Apple wouldn't have had to invent something new.

I've learned that I cannot stop people from constantly making these kinds of claims. You don't actually make a claim-- you just give me links and then assert there is prior art. This is not an argument, because you have failed to address the issue of what the patent actually says.

You can produce links to other websites all day long and then make it beholden on me to prove that they are not prior art. I'm not going to play that game.

You illustrate the root of the problem. You are not aware of what the multi-touch patents cover, what the inventions are, and you are not aware of what patents are and so you think the movie "minority report" and non-multi-touch touch screens are "prior art". (And FWIW, the stuff in minority report was conceptualized based on the research that was being done by what is now Apple.)

I've learned that you cannot argue facts with ideologues-- you will just make up your own facts, as you have done.

You can have the last word. I'm not going to debate this. I really, actually, don't care that you're anti-patent. I believe the anti-patent position is an ideological one that doesn't care about the facts... it is purely political. It is also anti-startup and anti-capitalist.

I was part of a team that developed a distributed realtime database. That is to say, a record could exist on a dozen servers, and these servers could be handling transactions from hundreds of thousands or millions of simultaneous users. This was back in the day of high latency due to modems, so we worked out how to deal with the fact that by the time a client might get some information it might be out of date. We did this to allow for massively multiplayer online games... this was not a bogus patent because we really did advance the state of the art, and for a couple years there only about a dozen people in the world were capable of producing this kind of software.

However, on slashdot, people claimed that this patent was a patent on "the idea of online games!!!!!!". Later there was a big discussion claiming we'd patented IRC and oh, how bogus that was, because IRC was around for YEARS before we filed our patent!

Nothing in the IRC protocol, or any of the online games at the time (or most of them sense) solved the problems we were solving in our patent.

The thing is, the anti-patent people never read the patent. The Amazon "one click patent "is not a patent on putting a "Buy now" button on a website. Our patent didn't cover IRC, etc.

I haven't done a survey of patents, and so I can't say what percentage of them are bogus, and what aren't. I can believe a bogus patent could exist, and there is a remedy for that-- present prior art and the patent gets thrown out. This is a pretty functional solution, and anyone pressing their case better be prepared because the possibility of prior art always exists.

So, I doubt there are many bogus patents, at least, not many that ever make it to court. I do think there are a lot of patents that are presented as "bogus" that aren't. My other patent has a headline that makes it sound totally bogus... but it isn't. I just can imagine what people will say about it-- because they never bother to read the patent.

They already believe patents are bogus and whenever they see yet another claim that a patent is bogus they are ready to believe it.

I have yet to hear an anti-patent argument that wasn't just repetition of the "patents are wrong" ideology.

I'm actually neutral on patents in the sense of "what would be best in an ideal world". But the bottom line is this- my work is not free unless I choose to donate it. Thus in exchange for giving you my work, I'm going to require a license. If you steal it, you've stolen it, just as if you stole a car.

But wait-- if you steal my car I don't have it anymore, you say, but if you steal my technology, I still have it, you say.

And yes, that's true, but it is irrelevant. If you want my technology enough to steal it, then my technology has value, and it is property, just as anything else I might build with my own hands is property. It isn't that technology can be replicated-- after all, I don't hear you saying software shouldn't be copyrighted or sold-- it is whether you can get your copy without paying me for my work or not.

Just because software or a patent can be replicated, doesn't mean it isn't property and isn't valuable.

Am I knocking down a straw man? Well, you didn't actually make any argument-- you just disparaged people who have a different point of view. So, that forced me to guess what your argument was, and then respond.

I do this so you understand that I am capable of making an argument... I just find the anti-patent people rarely give actual arguments to rebut.

I'm a software developer and have been working at startups for 20 years. I am pro-patent because I've seen it successfully used to protect a startup from an evil corporation-- in this case Microsoft.

I know the anti-patent people like to pretend that all programmers are anti-patent. I find it shameful to see how shoddy the thinking is when anti-patent people are confronted with pro-patent arguments.

I'm an HN member and have been participating in this website since 2006 or 2007 (though I got the boot for having a minority opinion.)

Patents are not anti-competitive. They actually force competition-- and they give a leg up to all of your competitors by quickly bringing them up to speed on the state of the art.

If the patent system didn't exist, and Apple didn't reveal its inventions, android would be 7 years behind the iPhone. In fact, android phones wouldn't exist. They'd still be at the drawing board trying to figure out how to make multi-touch work.

Its not like Apple just had this idea and then 7 months later introduced the iPhone!

I think people who are anti-patent don't actually understand what it takes to be innovative. It isn't easy, and it is silly to think that android would exist if Apple hadn't revealed its secrets as part of the patent process.

The thing is, in exchange for this revelation, google is required to come up with something new using this knowledge, not just copy it and sell it.

The problem with this is that prior to the introduction of the iPhone, android was designed to look like and work on phones like the blackberry. It was a better feature phone OS. After the iPhone came out, Google changed courses and counterfeited the iPhone.

If google wanted to compete, they could have spent 7 years investing in fundamental innovations-- like Apple did with touch-- to create their own new UI. Maybe they could have done a voice driven phone. OR, if touch was inevitable, they could have done their own, innovative take on touch UIs.

They did not. They turned around and cloned the iPhone and then gave the OS away for free. They were able to do this because the patent system requires Apple to publicly disclose their inventions. In exchange for this disclosure, Apple gets a monopoly on the use of their inventions. If you don't like this, that's fine, amend the constitution, and take it up with your congressman.

Google is now claiming that the government should step in and use force-- that is, decrees backed by men with guns and the threat of violence-- to allow google to steal other companies innovations and get away with it.

Think about that. Google cannot compete fair and square, so they steal their competitors technology. When this is pointed out, they call for the use of violence to let them get away with it! Talk about Doing Evil!

Apple learned their lesson last time around. They relied on copyright and license agreements to protect the invention of the GUI. The government did not have their back when Microsoft stole their invention, so this time, Apple made sure to patent their inventions.

This is not "anti-competitive", this the very definition of competition. Apple made a better widget to break into the fiercely competitive mobile phone market.

People only say "anti-competitive" when someone is competing successfully and they don't like it.

If justice prevails, Google will become the wholly owned search and advertising subsidiary of Apple. If corruption prevails, Apple will be prevented in succeeding against google in court. We'll see how it turns out.

Either way, Once again, Apple-- the only company in Silicon Valley with a track record of genuine innovation-- is being attacked by counterfeiters who can't be bothered to spend any R&D on coming up with something new themselves, and once again, the thieves are claiming that they're just "competing."

If you hope to ever profit form doing something innovative... and not get squashed by a company like google ripping you off... you really should be on Apple's side on this. They have always been the underdog that stuck to their guns and innovated really hard. That they've been successful at this shows that the underdog can sometimes win.

If its taken away from them, it will not be justice, and it will not be moral.

I've noticed a recent trend of self-promotion that I don't understand. I'm not writing to criticize, I just want to know why you say some of the things you do.

For instance, you call yourself a "rising sophomore". What does this mean? How is it different from any other sophomore? Can you explain why you chose that word and what the impression you intended to convey is?

Also, I love that you made a product like this quickly. In reading your story I noticed something you did right that I totally would have done wrong, and I appreciate being reminded of it. I applaud your gumption.

But then I clicked thru to the website and saw: "Our team of web usability experts has put together a comprehensive survey". So, do you have a team of web usability experts behind domain polish? I'm assuming it is your solo project. Why not say "Our carefully crafted, comprehensive survey" instead? Do you think that would really kill your sales that much? Do you have any qualms about saying you have a "team" of "experts"?

Notice, I'm not passing judgement... I'm asking questions because I want to understand your thinking, and also I find this alien culture of the "kids today" baffling and mystifying. :-)