The point of that section was not about the effect of land use restrictions on overall value but on local differences. If you are comparing the value of two different pieces of land with the same land use restrictions then they don't affect the value calculation. Deed restrictions are called out because they can affect the comparative value of two different pieces of land within the same zone.
Thunderbird is not something one can recommend to a non-techie friend as a replacement for GMail. At least the last time I checked on Android, it required additional tuning for pushes, it worked poorly when there was too many messages in inbox (which is what almost everyone coming from Gmail has), didn't provide text formatting.
I don't know about "the best", but I'm very happy with Fastmail. It has a very nice UI, it has contacts and calendar, uses open standards, and their privacy policy is fine.
I switched to Fastmail when I degoogled, and I've been very happy with it. I genuinely feel that its UX and feature set are better than what I was getting from GMail.
What UI features do you consider important? I feel that email UI is largely standardized, and the main differentiating factor is speed (and Gmail is definitely not fast).
OTOH, what Gmail does with filtering promotional crap (spam, tbh) is decent, but I haven't compared against other mail service providers, so I can't give a comparative opinion.
another vote for fastmail, I got my own domain and been slowly changing my email eveywhere away from gmail. No need to do it all in one go. I barely touch my gmail account anymore, feels so freeing!
Do you mean a self-hosted webmail app? Or a native/multi-platform native email client?
Personally I think Gmail UI is meh - but I no longer use email that much - so terrible UI/ux and no proper quoting/threading support isn't all that problematic.
If you're a reporter and a really good storyteller, which he definitely is, your reporting drive better be really, really good. At my most cynical, I would say that Gladwell writes non-fiction because it suits his style and makes for better stories, but that might be going too far.
The problem isn't really NPEs. If it makes sense to have patents, then it probably makes sense to have a market in patents. The problem is mostly low-quality patents and the fact that the patent system is a poor fit for software.
The way the US patent system works compared to other countries is that it's closer to copyright (though not quite copyright): any crappy idea can be patented as long as there's no prior art. The burden of proof is on those who own the patent and those who want to challenge it on court. The Bureau registers everything and then lets the businesses fight in courts.
This approach gives the US an advantage on the international patent market too: an American patent holder has the priority rights in other countries where it wishes to register the same patent.
All this kind of makes sense - kind of - but in practice there seem to be a lot of crappy patents with prior art that remain unchallenged and sometimes even confirmed in courts despite prior art.
This is what's broken. 1-click checkout shouldn't have been registered not because it's crappy but because there were web sites doing something very close or even similar under a different name. Those businesses either never bothered, were too small or went out of business by the time Amazon could be challenged in courts. I believe there are many more examples like this.
Someone has to take the burden of identifying prior art. The PTO doesn't seem to be interested, it's just extra work for them which as a govt. agency they tend to minimize. Businesses that could present prior art can be too small or even out of business by the time a patent is registered.
I believe it's a matter of some additional regulations but because I'm not a lawyer I can't really say how to fix this system.
