With a 3G connection to your Citrix farm and/or whatever RDP host you want to use (including hosted), you can do almost anything a good desktop can do.
Yikes! Using a remote desktop solution might be okay for managing servers, but I can barely stand the performance of VNC from across my house at 802.11g speeds. I can't imagine the sheer torture of trying to use it for everyday tasks, much less connecting to a home computer served by a DSL connection over a 3G connection. That would make the slowest netbook on the market seem positively snappy by comparison even with SpeedStep locked at the slowest setting.
Also, you would have to:
Leave a computer on while you're gone (and hope that you don't have a power failure).
Only travel within range of an AT&T 3G tower or Wi-Fi.
Never set foot on most aircraft.
The screen is still a little small - perhaps with the next processor upgrade they'll come out with an iPad+ with 17" or so at 1920x1080.
I can understand the desire to have a larger screen, but... 17 inches? Are you serious? An iPad the size of the largest MacBook Pro? The whole point of iPad is that it is easier to carry around than a laptop....
Actually, current patent law would forbid that. A shell company that is required to assign patents to the parent company would be charged fees like the parent company. A shell company that is not required to assign patents would mean the parent company cannot usefully use those patents offensively or defensively.
Also, I rather like the idea suggested by TimboJones in which every patent assignment is charged as though it were a new patent.
And further, a corporation can't apply for a patent, period. The sale hole is already plugged by current patent law; the fees charged to anyone who has an obligation to assign the patent to a corporation pays fees based on that corporation. That's already how it works for the small business fee. It would take a catastrophically inept wording by the patent office for that not to be the case for a tiered scheme as I suggested.:-)
The problem with the netbook is that it does nothing well. It cannot playback even 720p video properly from the web and you can forget about games.
That's simply not true.
First, newer netbook chipsets built within the last year should handle 720p just fine. The only thing holding it back on the web is Flash being a bloated pig, and if you have to use Flash, those videos won't play on the iPad anyway, making this a moot point. With the new Flash 10 betas, even recent netbooks should be able to handle 720p Flash videos.
Second, most tasks (word processing, web browsing, sending/receiving email, etc.) don't require much CPU power at all. A netbook should be able to handle those tasks with ease. Thus, they do a lot of things reasonably well. They just don't happen to be the things you care about.
With an iPad, you can not only do what netbooks can do...
Stop right there. The iPad is a cool device, but as a long-time Apple zealot, even I can't argue that it can do everything a netbook can do. I currently use a real laptop, but if I did have a netbook, I could still run Finale or Sibelius (clumsily); I could still run Apache, PHP, and a web browser to prototype a web site; I could still compile and debug software; I could still run Photoshop (slowly); and so on.
Eventually, the iPad will have equivalents for many of these tools, but they don't exist yet. Thus, at least for now, the right tool depends on what you want to do with it.
Actually, high enough fees will have an impact on large businesses, but only if they are truly high enough to make it impossible for small businesses. Fortunately, there is a third choice.
A much better pricing scheme would be one that forces companies of all sizes to prioritize their patent filings and only file the ones that matter. I propose that the base filing fee be tiered based on the number of non-expired patents the company holds or has pending:
0-9 patents: $10 per filing.
10-49 patents: $100 per filing.
50-99 patents: $500 per filing. This is almost double the current fee.
100-499 patents: $1,000 per filing.
500-999 patents: $5,000 per filing.
1,000-9,999 patents: $10,000 per filing.
10,000 patents or more: $100,000 per filing.
This would significantly reduce the number of crap patents. Right now, small entities get a lower filing fee, but that doesn't completely solve the problem, either. It just encourages small businesses to file too many patents. What matters is not how big the business is, but rather how many patents the business files.
Don't know why not. There are HDMI capture devices out there, and it takes all of a few minutes to build an IR blaster and attach it to a serial port or whatever.
The difference is that flaws in the Java runtime (or any runtime) are A. infrequent, B. somebody else's fault, C. quickly fixed once discovered, and D. not specific to your individual installation. Thus, as long as you pay attention to the security notices, you're probably fine.
Put another way, there are thousands of people looking for flaws in the Java runtime. When you're talking about flaws in your code, the only people looking for bugs in it are you and the bad guys. This means that it is much more problematic to have 1,000 bugs in your code than to have 1,000 bugs in the Java runtime. With the latter, the odds are in your favor that the flaws will be first discovered against somebody else's website. WIth the former, the only place those flaws can be discovered is on your website.
They made a statistical analysis of web languages. That's not generalizable to all programming languages as the Slashdot headline implies. All of these languages have several things in common:
Variable-length strings.
No truly fixed-size data structures or buffers.
No direct access to pointers.
In short, all of these programming languages eliminate entire classes of potential exploits that other programming languages allow. Therefore, although these programming languages happen to be similar, that does not mean that programming language choice has no bearing on security. It just means that choice of programming language within a very narrow range of languages that are not a representative sample of programming languages as a whole has no bearing on security.
The current eSATA standard (eSATAp) provides power, and some flash drives have supported it for a while. So really, the only thing significant is that this is the first SSD manufacturer to bother with USB 3.0....:-)
That said, you'll likely have to massively trade off frame rate for image quality, particularly when you're dealing with an embedded CPU doing the compression.
Satellite: 480 msec round trip ping time, minimum, from the equator, unless you're using a satellite constellation in LEO like Iridium, and if you are, expect to pay a very, very pretty penny.
Wireless: sporadic periods of multi-second round trip latency owing to only being able to send and receive data during free time slices.
Neighborhood co-op: no, that's not unfair competition unless the government does it. However, bear in mind that you would likely need a neighborhood of at least 1,000 houses to break even on a line that can compete with peak cable internet performance. Figure that you'll be lucky to get 40% of the people to sign up and that AFAICT, a DS3 will cost you about $12,000 per month. Divide that by 400 households and you're at $30 per month, or break-even with average cable Internet rates. In short, it takes a village to raise a network.
That case was also almost a hundred years ago. The makeup of the court changes over time, and their decisions change as the nature of industry changes. For example, Bilski is likely to have a profound impact on software patentability and goes against many previous cases that were heard by the courts. I think the courts are finally starting to realize that patents in high tech are actively harming innovation and the progress of science and the useful arts.
Also, MPEG LA sold a license presumably to the camcorder manufacturer for use in a professional camcorder. There is no substantial noninfringing use of a professional camcorder other than professional use. There are a handful of people who would use one non-commercially, but this represents such an insignificant percentage of the users of professional camcorders that the courts would inevitably roll their eyes, call MPEG LA a bunch of idiots, and laugh them out of court if they tried to argue such a point.
General Talking Pictures Corp also differs substantively from this situation in that in that case, the licensor granted permission to sell the tube only to other companies to build products based on it in specific fields, not to sell the product only to companies that use the products in specific ways. Those two are very different things. Developing a product that would infringe a patent requires a patent license unless you have purchased a part that provides said license. Thus, if the seller of that part was not authorized to sell it to you, then without that license, you would not have the right to manufacture the larger good.
By contrast, because of the sheer infeasibility of licensing a piece of hardware sold on the general market, MPEG LA cannot have any reasonable expectation that the manufacturer can sell a finished good exclusively to individuals who intend to use it in a specific way (which is what they would need to show in order for patent grants to corporate users to be invalid while retaining the validity of patent grants to non-corporate users). Thus, IMO, the only way they could legitimately sue you for using a licensed device in an unlicensed manner (in the absence of any prior contract between you and MPEG LA, that is) would be to invalidate the patent license that they granted to the manufacturer across the board for the entire product line (or the license that they granted to the chip manufacturer that the chip manufacturer violated when they sold the chip for use in a pro camcorder), which would mean the manufacturer would have to buy back every unit it sold illegally and would be fully liable for any contributory infringement by their customers, including end users. If they tried that even once, no manufacturer would EVER trust MPEG LA again, and they would be as good as dead. I don't think they are that stupid.
If you'd like two other SCOTUS cases that support my position, look at Adams v Burke and (Motion Picture Patents Co v Universal Film Mfg. That last one says that as soon as the product was sold unconditionally, "the article sold being thereby carried outside the monopoly of the patent law and rendered free of every restriction which the vendor may attempt to put upon it". (MPPCvUFM).
So the only question is whether the sale to the end consumer is an unconditional sale. In the absence of any signed contract to the contrary, it's pretty hard to conclude anything other than that yes, it is. In short, the consumer cannot be held liable for infringement. However, the upstream seller could be. Thus, the people who should be really pushing against MPEG LA are camera manufacturers and dealers. They're the ones who have the most to lose if MPEG LA ever gets uppity.
In the original finding (northern Cali), it was held that exhaustion applied because the product had no substantial use beyond an infringing use. The SCOTUS affirmed that. That seems to apply also to a camcorder; it has no substantial use other than to record and play back video, which in absence of a license, would be infringing.
The case you mention appears to be largely unrelated, being a case of one company that is part of a consortium hiding patents from a consortium in violation of the patent sharing agreement they had with the consortium. It has absolutely nothing to do with rights to use a lawfully manufactured product that you purchase lawfully, and certainly does not suggest that they would win such a case.
It does, however, reinforce the idea that MPEG LA is willing to sue everybody and their mother. Doesn't mean they will win. In fact, they basically have ZERO chance of winning, at least in the U.S. Like I said, LG v. Quanta covered this ground only two years ago and ruled that once you license a patent for use in manufacturing a product, you lose all rights to demand license fees from the downstream purchasers of that product even if they build products based around that product, which is much, much more significant use of the patented product than mere commercial use would be....
Actually, even that wouldn't happen. LG v. Quanta pretty conclusively settled this whole debate in favor of the end user/purchaser almost two years ago.
The only thing a patent holder can do as far as charging different licensing fee in different markets is to choose different rates to charge different manufacturers for licensing use in different products. For example, if they wanted to charge ten times as much for implementing the CODEC in pro camcorders, that's within their right. Maybe. If they didn't license the CODEC to a chip maker. If they did, then any pro camera vendor could legally use that chip to do their encoding/decoding and MPEG LA would have no right to prevent that use of the chip, much less pro use of the camera that holds that chip.
Once a patent is licensed for use in manufacturing a piece of hardware, the patent licensor has no right whatsoever to specify what the purchaser of the product can do with that piece of hardware unless the hardware product was manufactured without obtaining a patent license. A patent license granted to a manufacturer for the purposes of building a product constitutes an irrevocable license to that patent for any future purchaser of that product according to LG, and even to anyone who incorporates that product into another product!
Translation: if MPEG LA thinks anyone who buys a camcorder will EVER owe them royalties for using hardware that they lawfully purchased, they can get bent. Such legal threats have no basis in patent law. As Shakespeare would have put it, they are suits brought by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.
The patent system is designed to promote innovation - it wasn't designed to protect any individual or corporation regardless of size.
That's a bit disingenuous. At the time the patent system was created, there was no notion of a corporation as we know it today with most of the same rights as an individual. As far as I've been able to determine, corporations didn't typically own patents until around a century after U.S. patent law came into being, though it's hard to say that with any degree of certainty.
More to the point, when the patent system was created, we didn't have works for hire. We didn't have work contracts that require employees to assign all patents to their employer. And so on. Those assignment agreements completely change the nature of patents from benefitting the inventor to benefitting someone else in exchange for continued employment for a while. Thus, the patent system is not at all operating as originally designed, dramatically diminishing the incentive to innovate. After all, if you have a job anyway, where is the added incentive to come up with these great ideas? A chance to maybe get a raise, maybe get a bonus, maybe get squat? It's hardly a good deal for the inventor, though it's a great deal for the leechers.
The real question is whether corporate-owned patents have produced more innovation. I would contend that the reverse is true. If corporations had to go back to explicitly negotiating a license for each patent from its inventors, individuals would have greater incentive to come up with innovative ideas because they would reap the benefits directly instead of indirectly through their salaries (which rarely reflect a reasonable price for the contribution of those patents).
Ah, but privacy is also finite. Once lost, it can never be regained.
It's not at all like MP3s because facts can't be copyrighted. It's more like giving a friend information in confidence, only to find out he sold it to a tabloid.
In the event of true famine, they would make a good, albeit socially appalling food source. So I can see how pestillence leads to famine, which leads to killing puppies, but how does killing puppies cause a war?
Slashdot Mirror
Yikes! Using a remote desktop solution might be okay for managing servers, but I can barely stand the performance of VNC from across my house at 802.11g speeds. I can't imagine the sheer torture of trying to use it for everyday tasks, much less connecting to a home computer served by a DSL connection over a 3G connection. That would make the slowest netbook on the market seem positively snappy by comparison even with SpeedStep locked at the slowest setting.
Also, you would have to:
I can understand the desire to have a larger screen, but... 17 inches? Are you serious? An iPad the size of the largest MacBook Pro? The whole point of iPad is that it is easier to carry around than a laptop....
Actually, current patent law would forbid that. A shell company that is required to assign patents to the parent company would be charged fees like the parent company. A shell company that is not required to assign patents would mean the parent company cannot usefully use those patents offensively or defensively.
Also, I rather like the idea suggested by TimboJones in which every patent assignment is charged as though it were a new patent.
And further, a corporation can't apply for a patent, period. The sale hole is already plugged by current patent law; the fees charged to anyone who has an obligation to assign the patent to a corporation pays fees based on that corporation. That's already how it works for the small business fee. It would take a catastrophically inept wording by the patent office for that not to be the case for a tiered scheme as I suggested. :-)
That's simply not true.
First, newer netbook chipsets built within the last year should handle 720p just fine. The only thing holding it back on the web is Flash being a bloated pig, and if you have to use Flash, those videos won't play on the iPad anyway, making this a moot point. With the new Flash 10 betas, even recent netbooks should be able to handle 720p Flash videos.
Second, most tasks (word processing, web browsing, sending/receiving email, etc.) don't require much CPU power at all. A netbook should be able to handle those tasks with ease. Thus, they do a lot of things reasonably well. They just don't happen to be the things you care about.
Stop right there. The iPad is a cool device, but as a long-time Apple zealot, even I can't argue that it can do everything a netbook can do. I currently use a real laptop, but if I did have a netbook, I could still run Finale or Sibelius (clumsily); I could still run Apache, PHP, and a web browser to prototype a web site; I could still compile and debug software; I could still run Photoshop (slowly); and so on.
Eventually, the iPad will have equivalents for many of these tools, but they don't exist yet. Thus, at least for now, the right tool depends on what you want to do with it.
Actually, high enough fees will have an impact on large businesses, but only if they are truly high enough to make it impossible for small businesses. Fortunately, there is a third choice.
A much better pricing scheme would be one that forces companies of all sizes to prioritize their patent filings and only file the ones that matter. I propose that the base filing fee be tiered based on the number of non-expired patents the company holds or has pending:
This would significantly reduce the number of crap patents. Right now, small entities get a lower filing fee, but that doesn't completely solve the problem, either. It just encourages small businesses to file too many patents. What matters is not how big the business is, but rather how many patents the business files.
Don't know why not. There are HDMI capture devices out there, and it takes all of a few minutes to build an IR blaster and attach it to a serial port or whatever.
The difference is that flaws in the Java runtime (or any runtime) are A. infrequent, B. somebody else's fault, C. quickly fixed once discovered, and D. not specific to your individual installation. Thus, as long as you pay attention to the security notices, you're probably fine.
Put another way, there are thousands of people looking for flaws in the Java runtime. When you're talking about flaws in your code, the only people looking for bugs in it are you and the bad guys. This means that it is much more problematic to have 1,000 bugs in your code than to have 1,000 bugs in the Java runtime. With the latter, the odds are in your favor that the flaws will be first discovered against somebody else's website. WIth the former, the only place those flaws can be discovered is on your website.
They made a statistical analysis of web languages. That's not generalizable to all programming languages as the Slashdot headline implies. All of these languages have several things in common:
In short, all of these programming languages eliminate entire classes of potential exploits that other programming languages allow. Therefore, although these programming languages happen to be similar, that does not mean that programming language choice has no bearing on security. It just means that choice of programming language within a very narrow range of languages that are not a representative sample of programming languages as a whole has no bearing on security.
Although you didn't say it, the way you worded your post sounded like you were implying that eSATA couldn't power drives.
They learned it from the military. Why do you think the shuttle was so expensive? :-)
The current eSATA standard (eSATAp) provides power, and some flash drives have supported it for a while. So really, the only thing significant is that this is the first SSD manufacturer to bother with USB 3.0.... :-)
No, no, no. The point of the MicroSIM is so that you can sneak it across the border in your sinus cavity to evade the authorities.
Oops. I've said too much. :-D
Yeah, but you spent an hour soldering half of a $7 USB cable to repair a $15 Wi-Fi dongle.... :-)
For example: http://www.everythingusb.com/microsoft-lifecam-vx-7000-14105.html
Or use a point-and-shoot with a webcam mode.
That said, you'll likely have to massively trade off frame rate for image quality, particularly when you're dealing with an embedded CPU doing the compression.
From Airplane II quotes:
Soldier: Those lights are blinking out of sequence.
Murdock: Make them blink in sequence.
That said, make no mistake about it: after the nuclear holocaust, the only things that will be alive are cockroaches and Twinkies.
Don't blame me; I voted for Kodos.
Satellite: 480 msec round trip ping time, minimum, from the equator, unless you're using a satellite constellation in LEO like Iridium, and if you are, expect to pay a very, very pretty penny.
Wireless: sporadic periods of multi-second round trip latency owing to only being able to send and receive data during free time slices.
Neighborhood co-op: no, that's not unfair competition unless the government does it. However, bear in mind that you would likely need a neighborhood of at least 1,000 houses to break even on a line that can compete with peak cable internet performance. Figure that you'll be lucky to get 40% of the people to sign up and that AFAICT, a DS3 will cost you about $12,000 per month. Divide that by 400 households and you're at $30 per month, or break-even with average cable Internet rates. In short, it takes a village to raise a network.
That case was also almost a hundred years ago. The makeup of the court changes over time, and their decisions change as the nature of industry changes. For example, Bilski is likely to have a profound impact on software patentability and goes against many previous cases that were heard by the courts. I think the courts are finally starting to realize that patents in high tech are actively harming innovation and the progress of science and the useful arts.
Also, MPEG LA sold a license presumably to the camcorder manufacturer for use in a professional camcorder. There is no substantial noninfringing use of a professional camcorder other than professional use. There are a handful of people who would use one non-commercially, but this represents such an insignificant percentage of the users of professional camcorders that the courts would inevitably roll their eyes, call MPEG LA a bunch of idiots, and laugh them out of court if they tried to argue such a point.
General Talking Pictures Corp also differs substantively from this situation in that in that case, the licensor granted permission to sell the tube only to other companies to build products based on it in specific fields, not to sell the product only to companies that use the products in specific ways. Those two are very different things. Developing a product that would infringe a patent requires a patent license unless you have purchased a part that provides said license. Thus, if the seller of that part was not authorized to sell it to you, then without that license, you would not have the right to manufacture the larger good.
By contrast, because of the sheer infeasibility of licensing a piece of hardware sold on the general market, MPEG LA cannot have any reasonable expectation that the manufacturer can sell a finished good exclusively to individuals who intend to use it in a specific way (which is what they would need to show in order for patent grants to corporate users to be invalid while retaining the validity of patent grants to non-corporate users). Thus, IMO, the only way they could legitimately sue you for using a licensed device in an unlicensed manner (in the absence of any prior contract between you and MPEG LA, that is) would be to invalidate the patent license that they granted to the manufacturer across the board for the entire product line (or the license that they granted to the chip manufacturer that the chip manufacturer violated when they sold the chip for use in a pro camcorder), which would mean the manufacturer would have to buy back every unit it sold illegally and would be fully liable for any contributory infringement by their customers, including end users. If they tried that even once, no manufacturer would EVER trust MPEG LA again, and they would be as good as dead. I don't think they are that stupid.
If you'd like two other SCOTUS cases that support my position, look at Adams v Burke and (Motion Picture Patents Co v Universal Film Mfg. That last one says that as soon as the product was sold unconditionally, "the article sold being thereby carried outside the monopoly of the patent law and rendered free of every restriction which the vendor may attempt to put upon it". (MPPCvUFM).
So the only question is whether the sale to the end consumer is an unconditional sale. In the absence of any signed contract to the contrary, it's pretty hard to conclude anything other than that yes, it is. In short, the consumer cannot be held liable for infringement. However, the upstream seller could be. Thus, the people who should be really pushing against MPEG LA are camera manufacturers and dealers. They're the ones who have the most to lose if MPEG LA ever gets uppity.
In the original finding (northern Cali), it was held that exhaustion applied because the product had no substantial use beyond an infringing use. The SCOTUS affirmed that. That seems to apply also to a camcorder; it has no substantial use other than to record and play back video, which in absence of a license, would be infringing.
LG v. Quanta would beg to disagree.
The case you mention appears to be largely unrelated, being a case of one company that is part of a consortium hiding patents from a consortium in violation of the patent sharing agreement they had with the consortium. It has absolutely nothing to do with rights to use a lawfully manufactured product that you purchase lawfully, and certainly does not suggest that they would win such a case.
It does, however, reinforce the idea that MPEG LA is willing to sue everybody and their mother. Doesn't mean they will win. In fact, they basically have ZERO chance of winning, at least in the U.S. Like I said, LG v. Quanta covered this ground only two years ago and ruled that once you license a patent for use in manufacturing a product, you lose all rights to demand license fees from the downstream purchasers of that product even if they build products based around that product, which is much, much more significant use of the patented product than mere commercial use would be....
Actually, even that wouldn't happen. LG v. Quanta pretty conclusively settled this whole debate in favor of the end user/purchaser almost two years ago.
The only thing a patent holder can do as far as charging different licensing fee in different markets is to choose different rates to charge different manufacturers for licensing use in different products. For example, if they wanted to charge ten times as much for implementing the CODEC in pro camcorders, that's within their right. Maybe. If they didn't license the CODEC to a chip maker. If they did, then any pro camera vendor could legally use that chip to do their encoding/decoding and MPEG LA would have no right to prevent that use of the chip, much less pro use of the camera that holds that chip.
Once a patent is licensed for use in manufacturing a piece of hardware, the patent licensor has no right whatsoever to specify what the purchaser of the product can do with that piece of hardware unless the hardware product was manufactured without obtaining a patent license. A patent license granted to a manufacturer for the purposes of building a product constitutes an irrevocable license to that patent for any future purchaser of that product according to LG, and even to anyone who incorporates that product into another product!
Translation: if MPEG LA thinks anyone who buys a camcorder will EVER owe them royalties for using hardware that they lawfully purchased, they can get bent. Such legal threats have no basis in patent law. As Shakespeare would have put it, they are suits brought by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.
That's a bit disingenuous. At the time the patent system was created, there was no notion of a corporation as we know it today with most of the same rights as an individual. As far as I've been able to determine, corporations didn't typically own patents until around a century after U.S. patent law came into being, though it's hard to say that with any degree of certainty.
More to the point, when the patent system was created, we didn't have works for hire. We didn't have work contracts that require employees to assign all patents to their employer. And so on. Those assignment agreements completely change the nature of patents from benefitting the inventor to benefitting someone else in exchange for continued employment for a while. Thus, the patent system is not at all operating as originally designed, dramatically diminishing the incentive to innovate. After all, if you have a job anyway, where is the added incentive to come up with these great ideas? A chance to maybe get a raise, maybe get a bonus, maybe get squat? It's hardly a good deal for the inventor, though it's a great deal for the leechers.
The real question is whether corporate-owned patents have produced more innovation. I would contend that the reverse is true. If corporations had to go back to explicitly negotiating a license for each patent from its inventors, individuals would have greater incentive to come up with innovative ideas because they would reap the benefits directly instead of indirectly through their salaries (which rarely reflect a reasonable price for the contribution of those patents).
Ah, but privacy is also finite. Once lost, it can never be regained.
It's not at all like MP3s because facts can't be copyrighted. It's more like giving a friend information in confidence, only to find out he sold it to a tabloid.
In the event of true famine, they would make a good, albeit socially appalling food source. So I can see how pestillence leads to famine, which leads to killing puppies, but how does killing puppies cause a war?