Whether MS is "right" or "wrong" cannot be evaluated without knowing the legitimacy of the patents themselves.
Using patents "to make money" is not evil. That's what patents are for. They exist specifically to create economic incentives -- not to protect against some "loss" as you seem to be suggesting, but to create a gain.
Enforcing your rights in a way that hurts your competition may not be "playing nice", but it is also not "wrong". Your competition shouldn't have put itself in a position to depend on you not enforcing your rights. Even if MS is totally motivated by a desire to "hurt open source", that doesn't automatically put them in the wrong (no matter how much we as a group like open source).
A patent system that inspires general skepticism about the validity of any given patent, and that actively allows for selective enforcement, is badly broken to be sure.
As always, I find myself taking a middle-ground line no copyright issues.
First off, the market for Karaoke tracks isn't the same as the consumer market for music. Commercial vs. personal use, for a start. Conclusions drawn by observing the one can't really be applied to the other. (This does not mean that I oppose copyright on consumer music -- I don't, as my post history should make clear. I do think the current system is broken and getting worse, though.)
So addressing the karaoke market... As far as I can tell, the reason copyright infringement in the karaoke business has gotten so bad is:
1) In the past five years, there's been a shift from CD-based to hard-drive-based karaoke systems. This is a vastly superior technology and makes for better, easier-to-run shows, but it does make it easy to copy entire libraries.
2) The karaoke industry has always had misinformation and over-enforcement (or at least the threat of over-enforcement) when it comes to copyright violations. This got worse with the rise of hard-drive-based systems, with many disc publishers claiming that format-shifting tracks you legally own would be a copyright violation.
3) There was a backlash against this misinformation, with the companies that sell software for hard-drive-based systems advertising that copying the discs to hard drive is completely legal -- but not always being careful to say "as long as you own the original disc".
4) A lot of KJ's, like a lot of other small business owners, hear what they want to hear when it gives them the opportunity to side-step thousands of dollars in expenses to build a huge library that will make them more profitable.
Just my observations by way of a bit of perspective: if the compaines making the discs had handled IP issues better, things might not be as bad as they are. That doesn't make piracy right, but it is a lesson that any media company should learn from.
None of that changes the conclusion that in the karaoke disc industry piracy translates to lower demand / lost profits. It is still not reasonable to call each track copied equivalent to a lost sale -- if they payed full price for discs, KJ's would do their best with a smaller library -- but that doesn't make the impact negligible.
If you don't know the history, you don't know enough context. The point is, when MS is not restrained by anti-trust rulings they do all of the things you say they don't do. So even if they were doing none of them now (which is not the case), that wouldn't be an argument against enforcing anti-trust rulings against them; it would be proof that the enforcement is having some effect.
Tell us what you've seen
I did tell you what I've seen. If you want full details, discuss with my previous employer your desire for me to disclose proprietary information about the project work I did for him.
Before you bother accusing me of lying, you should understand that I don't care if you believe me. I'm telilng you what I know to be a fact. If you want to believe otherwise, that's up to you.
and [tell us] how it was an unfair advantage
If their developers can communicate with the OS in ways that other companies' developers cannot, then they have an advantage.
But it doesn't matter. As I noted before, the current matter is about marketing advantage, not technical advantage.
The government has explicitely put itself in the business of leveling competitive playing fields if said fields are found to be tilted by the use of a monopoly position that one player holds. If you don't like the law, lobby to change it; but don't expect a business (which exists for the express purpose of making money and could be sued by shareholders if it doesn't try to do so) not to pursue the legal remedies to which the government says they are entitled.
Amongst Windows, Ubuntu, and MacOS, exactly one has been found by the courts to represent a monopoly market position. That means that Microsoft is under legal obligations that don't apply to the other two.
"And how can this be anti competitive when none of the mentioned browsers charge for their browser"
The players in the browser market believe they benefit from having market share. Google didn't write Chrome just for their health. Whether you or I see the mechanism for that benefit doesn't matter. More basically: the browsers compete, therefore there can be competitive advantage and anti-competitive behavior.
"MS is not a monopoly. Just because the linux nerds like to troll out this piece of FUD doesn't make it true"
It has been found by both American and EU authorities that MS holds a monopoly in the OS market and leverages that monopoly in other markets, which in both places is illegal. As far as the law is concerned, the court findings make it true, any debate between you and the "linux nerds" aside.
"Operating Systems that run on x86 processors"
In evaluating competition in the market, the US court did consider MacOS (which at the time did not run on x86, though it does today); so at best your claim is misleading.
"So if we take operating systems that run on Power PC processors, [...]"
Let's assume, for a moment, that the court would identify that as a distinct market. Let's further assume that they would agree that Apple has an effective monopoly in that market. Neither of those is a slam dunk, but suppose they're both found true.
Now as soon as Apple leverages that monopoly to competitive advantage in another market, you'll have a useful parallel.
"NO JUDGE EVER has deemed Microsoft as a monopoly on office software, developer tools, windows mobile, game consoles, etc etc."
That they compete in markets where they aren't a monopoly doesn't immunize them against (or have anything to do with) charges that they abused the monopoly position they are found to hold in the OS market.
"Office, Visual Studio, etc etc have very limited advantage from running on Windows. They could run on whichever OS was the most popular. AFAIK they don't get any special favors from the OS team. Nobody outside of the windows team even has access to the OS source code"
The court is concerning itself with marketing advantage, not technical advantage. So this is really a moot point, but:
MS does more to separate its OS team from its other operations than it used to, as a result of antitrust rulings. However, to say that other teams don't have access to the source code is incorrect; and any suggestion that the OS and app teams wouldn't be "doing special favors" for each other absent anti-trust regulation is contradicted by history.
"If any of them use undocumented APIs then they don't ship"
I'm skeptical of that claim, but I don't know. What I do know for a fact is, they do ship products that use undocumented features of "documented" API's. (i.e. they pass in undocumented values for control parameters that completely change what the function does.) I've seen it first hand.
Google must be losing confidence in their ability to compete on leveraged monopoly market positions alone.
Fixed.
(As I've noted elsewhere, I disagree with some of the finding-of-fact material used to claim MS has a monopoly. But, the courts disagree with me, both here and in the EU. That being the case, competitors in those markets have every right to expect enforcement of the law consistent with those findings.)
I'll preface this with the point that I am speaking of American English. I don't know how other parts of the world treat the word decimate; nor do I know what dialect is native to you. But I do know that this is an American-centric forum, so carrying on:
All of my life, decimate has meant "to greatly diminish". It wasn't until high school that I learned it had ever meant anything else (and even then the person quoting the historical definition had it wrong). And 15 years on down the line, it's still much more rare to hear the historical meaning of the word. Find it as stupid as you like, but the language has moved on with or without you.
I guess the question is, by what authority do you declare that the word has the single, "plain and simple" meaning that you prefer? Personally I think words get their meaning from common usage, which disagrees with you; but even checking the dictionary, what I see is that both definitions are correct.
The Supreme Court didn't say the guy was guilty of defamation. It refused to shield him from a criminal trial. I don't know Indian law so can't say if the defense will hold up, but TFA does not imply that it won't; that won't be determined until the trial.
The thing is, the ability to prefer one network over another isn't some bizarre edge case; it's the normal behavior of every cell phone. I might be closer to a Sprint tower than an AT&T tower, but if I'm on an AT&T phone, I don't roam onto Sprint unless I have to. If this weren't so, you couldn't walk across town without drifting in and out of roam. (This is less an issue now than it was in the 90's -- unless you're near a national boundary -- but that doesn't mean the phone should ignore it.)
"Strongest signal" != "best connection". That assumption is a design flaw.
"The design is to connect to the tower with the best reception"
But as this story points out, there are factors other than "best reception" than can weigh into which tower is best to connect to. Looking at only one factor in a multi-dimensional problem is a poor design.
In a good design, the phone would connect to a "home network" tower with "acceptable" reception before even looking at an "international roaming / if you have to ask you can't afford it" tower.
Re:looks like it still loses history
on
BASH 4.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'll grant I haven't thought this all the way through, but a slightly lighter-weight approach than daemons and databases might look like this:
Each open session logs history to a uniquely-named file. Then on session close, that file can be appended to the one true history file. (A bit of file locking can maintain atomicity of the append step.)
When you scroll back into history, you would start with your own session's still-open-and-separate history file -- which is more often than not what I'd expect, but not always what I get today. If you go back beyond the beginning of that, I supposed you'd scroll into the accumulated history of closed sessions.
This means that one session doesn't "see" the history from a concurrent session while they're both open. That, too, can be addressed, even if it has to wait for a subsequetn release. Either way, it's better than just losing the data IMO.
I don't trust them either, but I also know that I'm in no position to know one way or the other. Everything I "know" about the Chinese government, I heard from someone else.
I read an interview with some journalist -- I can't remember who at the moment, but it's not important -- in which he described the difference between skepticism and cynicism as the difference between "I don't know; I'm going to find out" vs. "I already know; I don't need to find out".
Of course, most Americans (including myself, I assume including you) aren't in a position to "find out". We can watch and wait, but even in the end we'll get information filtered through many hands we can choose to trust or not trust. If the blogger finds evidence that supports the story was being covered up, will we trust the people who say it proves the idea worked or those who say the blogger had an axe to grind? If he finds no evidence, will we trust those who say there was nothing to find, or those who say it proves the whole thing was a stunt? And that's if we ever see any follow-up to this story at all...
So I want to take a skeptical view when any government makes a move like this. It feels like it could be a pubilcity stunt. But I also know that barring a major change in my career and lifestyle, I cannot know for sure who is, or isn't, making an honest effort.
(Note that my above comment is not limited to the Chinese government. There's a definite propaganda spin that can be read from "embedded reporters", too.)
Absent the ability to independently verify, I guess the difference between a cynic and a skeptic is intent. So here's my question for everyone who claims standing to presume the intentions of the Chinese government: If presented with evidence that this was legit, would you hear it or would you dismiss it out of hand?
I'm curious what "monster" you think I'm talking about simulating. Having RTFA (before my initial post, no less), I'd say modeling the nodes of the NON-VON will be pretty simple.
As to how long you'll be waiting... especially since I said I might do it, it could indeed be a while in terms of calendar time. I didn't say "I'm going to do this by tomorrow"; I said I expect the programming to take about a day's effort. If/when that effort might start, or how spread out it might be even then, nobody knows.
"We are discussing the difference between a rocket engine and a jet engine."
Actually, we're discussing a third category of engine -- which is apparently called by its inventors an air-breathing rocket engine.
A cell phone is not a phone according to the dictionary definition at the time it was invented. (It's more of a two-way radio that has an interface to the phone network, but nobody felt like calilng it that.) A DSL modem is most certainly not a modem (there is no analog signal on either side of the device). Many LCD and plasma TV's are not TV's (they have no tuner).
So it is with this engine. The term "air-breathing rocket engine" is a pretty good description for an engine that carries and can use its own oxidizer, but also can supplement that using outside air when operating at (relatively) low speeds and altitudes.
Ok, he was able to put a 32-node system on an FPGA. You interconnect a few, and you'll have a special-purpose procesor for a couple-hundred-record dataset. That won't do "huge database searches", I'm afraid. Ultra-fast processing of a few hundred records is not impressive.
If you're going to tell me I'm talking out my ass, you might want to do the math first.
I found this original intent of 1 processor = 1 record interesting as well, but more from a "so that's why this isn't around today" standpoint.
In the day it may have sounded like a promising approach. 1M records may have sounded like a big dataset. But today there are two types of dataset -- those so small that a conventional computer can handle them just fine, and those so big that this architecture cannot scale to them. I work in a data warehouse that loads several million records per day.
To be fair, I respect this approach as possibly contributing to the massively-parallel database architecture in Teradata. It, too, works on the premise that a large number of processing elements (it calls them AMPs) each independently handle some of the data -- and in early implementations each AMP was a piece of hardware, kind of like this system. It scales better because each AMP handles an arbitrary subset of the data, not just one record. Each AMP has its own disks, not merely a bit of RAM and a few registers.
Of course a modern computer can simulate a 1980's computer. It would probably take about a day to write a functional simulation in Java.
For that matter, it's not like this computer can do anything that a modern computer can't do in spite of the different architecture. It was designed to do certain things fast, but anything off the shelf today could run circles around these relics regardless of such optimization. (To GP's point -- since the article indicates that he was building to the functional design of the original, it's probably not powerful by today's standards. He may have used faster components than they had back then -- and he obviously used smaller components than they had back then -- but we're not looking at a modern billions-and-billions-of-transistors-on-a-chip optimized-in-ways-you-cannot-comprehend heat-sink-needing CPU.) So once you talk about "what can it do" at a useful level of abstraction, the answer is "nothing all that practical".
But that's not the point, is it? This kind of stuff is a hobby and a fascination to some people. I'm interested enough that I might write a software simulation of the machine, but not interested enough to build one. This guy was interested enough to build one.
It's not like stamp collectors are saving up for a big letter-writing campaign...
That probably depends on jurisdiction, but in general I'd say extortion is a broader term than you think and this could be construed as extortion.
The elements of extortion are typically a threat, intent to take money to which one isn't entitled, and sometimes the actual acquisition of the property as a result of the threat. The question is, does the threat to leave negative reviews visible count?
You appear to be asserting that the threat has to be affirmative in nature -- i.e. "give me what I want, or I will do something to you". But that's not necessarily the case. Threatening to withhold testimony can be extortion; so at least some of the time, the threat can be one of omission -- "give me what I want or I will not do something that would prevent harm to you".
That the threatened action be illegal, or that the harm be unjust by any particular standard, are not typically elements of the crime.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether MS is "right" or "wrong" cannot be evaluated without knowing the legitimacy of the patents themselves.
Using patents "to make money" is not evil. That's what patents are for. They exist specifically to create economic incentives -- not to protect against some "loss" as you seem to be suggesting, but to create a gain.
Enforcing your rights in a way that hurts your competition may not be "playing nice", but it is also not "wrong". Your competition shouldn't have put itself in a position to depend on you not enforcing your rights. Even if MS is totally motivated by a desire to "hurt open source", that doesn't automatically put them in the wrong (no matter how much we as a group like open source).
A patent system that inspires general skepticism about the validity of any given patent, and that actively allows for selective enforcement, is badly broken to be sure.
"Either we get law analysis by techies, or we don't get anything"
So can we put it to a vote?
As always, I find myself taking a middle-ground line no copyright issues.
First off, the market for Karaoke tracks isn't the same as the consumer market for music. Commercial vs. personal use, for a start. Conclusions drawn by observing the one can't really be applied to the other. (This does not mean that I oppose copyright on consumer music -- I don't, as my post history should make clear. I do think the current system is broken and getting worse, though.)
So addressing the karaoke market... As far as I can tell, the reason copyright infringement in the karaoke business has gotten so bad is:
1) In the past five years, there's been a shift from CD-based to hard-drive-based karaoke systems. This is a vastly superior technology and makes for better, easier-to-run shows, but it does make it easy to copy entire libraries.
2) The karaoke industry has always had misinformation and over-enforcement (or at least the threat of over-enforcement) when it comes to copyright violations. This got worse with the rise of hard-drive-based systems, with many disc publishers claiming that format-shifting tracks you legally own would be a copyright violation.
3) There was a backlash against this misinformation, with the companies that sell software for hard-drive-based systems advertising that copying the discs to hard drive is completely legal -- but not always being careful to say "as long as you own the original disc".
4) A lot of KJ's, like a lot of other small business owners, hear what they want to hear when it gives them the opportunity to side-step thousands of dollars in expenses to build a huge library that will make them more profitable.
Just my observations by way of a bit of perspective: if the compaines making the discs had handled IP issues better, things might not be as bad as they are. That doesn't make piracy right, but it is a lesson that any media company should learn from.
None of that changes the conclusion that in the karaoke disc industry piracy translates to lower demand / lost profits. It is still not reasonable to call each track copied equivalent to a lost sale -- if they payed full price for discs, KJ's would do their best with a smaller library -- but that doesn't make the impact negligible.
In Soviet Russia, heat warms you.
Sorry, AC, you don't get to set the terms of discussion.
They don't.
Believe what you want.
I don't know what "history" you're talking about
If you don't know the history, you don't know enough context. The point is, when MS is not restrained by anti-trust rulings they do all of the things you say they don't do. So even if they were doing none of them now (which is not the case), that wouldn't be an argument against enforcing anti-trust rulings against them; it would be proof that the enforcement is having some effect.
Tell us what you've seen
I did tell you what I've seen. If you want full details, discuss with my previous employer your desire for me to disclose proprietary information about the project work I did for him.
Before you bother accusing me of lying, you should understand that I don't care if you believe me. I'm telilng you what I know to be a fact. If you want to believe otherwise, that's up to you.
and [tell us] how it was an unfair advantage
If their developers can communicate with the OS in ways that other companies' developers cannot, then they have an advantage.
But it doesn't matter. As I noted before, the current matter is about marketing advantage, not technical advantage.
The government has explicitely put itself in the business of leveling competitive playing fields if said fields are found to be tilted by the use of a monopoly position that one player holds. If you don't like the law, lobby to change it; but don't expect a business (which exists for the express purpose of making money and could be sued by shareholders if it doesn't try to do so) not to pursue the legal remedies to which the government says they are entitled.
Amongst Windows, Ubuntu, and MacOS, exactly one has been found by the courts to represent a monopoly market position. That means that Microsoft is under legal obligations that don't apply to the other two.
"And how can this be anti competitive when none of the mentioned browsers charge for their browser"
The players in the browser market believe they benefit from having market share. Google didn't write Chrome just for their health. Whether you or I see the mechanism for that benefit doesn't matter. More basically: the browsers compete, therefore there can be competitive advantage and anti-competitive behavior.
"MS is not a monopoly. Just because the linux nerds like to troll out this piece of FUD doesn't make it true"
It has been found by both American and EU authorities that MS holds a monopoly in the OS market and leverages that monopoly in other markets, which in both places is illegal. As far as the law is concerned, the court findings make it true, any debate between you and the "linux nerds" aside.
"Operating Systems that run on x86 processors"
In evaluating competition in the market, the US court did consider MacOS (which at the time did not run on x86, though it does today); so at best your claim is misleading.
"So if we take operating systems that run on Power PC processors, [...]"
Let's assume, for a moment, that the court would identify that as a distinct market. Let's further assume that they would agree that Apple has an effective monopoly in that market. Neither of those is a slam dunk, but suppose they're both found true.
Now as soon as Apple leverages that monopoly to competitive advantage in another market, you'll have a useful parallel.
"NO JUDGE EVER has deemed Microsoft as a monopoly on office software, developer tools, windows mobile, game consoles, etc etc."
That they compete in markets where they aren't a monopoly doesn't immunize them against (or have anything to do with) charges that they abused the monopoly position they are found to hold in the OS market.
"Office, Visual Studio, etc etc have very limited advantage from running on Windows. They could run on whichever OS was the most popular. AFAIK they don't get any special favors from the OS team. Nobody outside of the windows team even has access to the OS source code"
The court is concerning itself with marketing advantage, not technical advantage. So this is really a moot point, but:
MS does more to separate its OS team from its other operations than it used to, as a result of antitrust rulings. However, to say that other teams don't have access to the source code is incorrect; and any suggestion that the OS and app teams wouldn't be "doing special favors" for each other absent anti-trust regulation is contradicted by history.
"If any of them use undocumented APIs then they don't ship"
I'm skeptical of that claim, but I don't know. What I do know for a fact is, they do ship products that use undocumented features of "documented" API's. (i.e. they pass in undocumented values for control parameters that completely change what the function does.) I've seen it first hand.
Google must be losing confidence in their ability to compete on leveraged monopoly market positions alone.
Fixed.
(As I've noted elsewhere, I disagree with some of the finding-of-fact material used to claim MS has a monopoly. But, the courts disagree with me, both here and in the EU. That being the case, competitors in those markets have every right to expect enforcement of the law consistent with those findings.)
You've answered the wrong question. That would fit the question "If Firefox is superior, why hasn't Firefox won the browser war?"
And that is exactly why this is still an issue, GGP's assertion that the browser war is over notwithstanding.
I mean, sure, if the janitor brought down the service, that's pretty bad, but it seems a bit harsh to start calling him a "maintenance goof" ...
(tip your bartenders and waiters)
I'll preface this with the point that I am speaking of American English. I don't know how other parts of the world treat the word decimate; nor do I know what dialect is native to you. But I do know that this is an American-centric forum, so carrying on:
All of my life, decimate has meant "to greatly diminish". It wasn't until high school that I learned it had ever meant anything else (and even then the person quoting the historical definition had it wrong). And 15 years on down the line, it's still much more rare to hear the historical meaning of the word. Find it as stupid as you like, but the language has moved on with or without you.
I guess the question is, by what authority do you declare that the word has the single, "plain and simple" meaning that you prefer? Personally I think words get their meaning from common usage, which disagrees with you; but even checking the dictionary, what I see is that both definitions are correct.
Natural language isn't plain and simple, ever.
The Supreme Court didn't say the guy was guilty of defamation. It refused to shield him from a criminal trial. I don't know Indian law so can't say if the defense will hold up, but TFA does not imply that it won't; that won't be determined until the trial.
The thing is, the ability to prefer one network over another isn't some bizarre edge case; it's the normal behavior of every cell phone. I might be closer to a Sprint tower than an AT&T tower, but if I'm on an AT&T phone, I don't roam onto Sprint unless I have to. If this weren't so, you couldn't walk across town without drifting in and out of roam. (This is less an issue now than it was in the 90's -- unless you're near a national boundary -- but that doesn't mean the phone should ignore it.)
"Strongest signal" != "best connection". That assumption is a design flaw.
"The design is to connect to the tower with the best reception"
But as this story points out, there are factors other than "best reception" than can weigh into which tower is best to connect to. Looking at only one factor in a multi-dimensional problem is a poor design.
In a good design, the phone would connect to a "home network" tower with "acceptable" reception before even looking at an "international roaming / if you have to ask you can't afford it" tower.
I'll grant I haven't thought this all the way through, but a slightly lighter-weight approach than daemons and databases might look like this:
Each open session logs history to a uniquely-named file. Then on session close, that file can be appended to the one true history file. (A bit of file locking can maintain atomicity of the append step.)
When you scroll back into history, you would start with your own session's still-open-and-separate history file -- which is more often than not what I'd expect, but not always what I get today. If you go back beyond the beginning of that, I supposed you'd scroll into the accumulated history of closed sessions.
This means that one session doesn't "see" the history from a concurrent session while they're both open. That, too, can be addressed, even if it has to wait for a subsequetn release. Either way, it's better than just losing the data IMO.
I don't trust them either, but I also know that I'm in no position to know one way or the other. Everything I "know" about the Chinese government, I heard from someone else.
I read an interview with some journalist -- I can't remember who at the moment, but it's not important -- in which he described the difference between skepticism and cynicism as the difference between "I don't know; I'm going to find out" vs. "I already know; I don't need to find out".
Of course, most Americans (including myself, I assume including you) aren't in a position to "find out". We can watch and wait, but even in the end we'll get information filtered through many hands we can choose to trust or not trust. If the blogger finds evidence that supports the story was being covered up, will we trust the people who say it proves the idea worked or those who say the blogger had an axe to grind? If he finds no evidence, will we trust those who say there was nothing to find, or those who say it proves the whole thing was a stunt? And that's if we ever see any follow-up to this story at all...
So I want to take a skeptical view when any government makes a move like this. It feels like it could be a pubilcity stunt. But I also know that barring a major change in my career and lifestyle, I cannot know for sure who is, or isn't, making an honest effort.
(Note that my above comment is not limited to the Chinese government. There's a definite propaganda spin that can be read from "embedded reporters", too.)
Absent the ability to independently verify, I guess the difference between a cynic and a skeptic is intent. So here's my question for everyone who claims standing to presume the intentions of the Chinese government: If presented with evidence that this was legit, would you hear it or would you dismiss it out of hand?
"tell us ONE promise he made he has kept????"
Take your pick.
I'm curious what "monster" you think I'm talking about simulating. Having RTFA (before my initial post, no less), I'd say modeling the nodes of the NON-VON will be pretty simple.
As to how long you'll be waiting... especially since I said I might do it, it could indeed be a while in terms of calendar time. I didn't say "I'm going to do this by tomorrow"; I said I expect the programming to take about a day's effort. If/when that effort might start, or how spread out it might be even then, nobody knows.
"We are discussing the difference between a rocket engine and a jet engine."
Actually, we're discussing a third category of engine -- which is apparently called by its inventors an air-breathing rocket engine.
A cell phone is not a phone according to the dictionary definition at the time it was invented. (It's more of a two-way radio that has an interface to the phone network, but nobody felt like calilng it that.) A DSL modem is most certainly not a modem (there is no analog signal on either side of the device). Many LCD and plasma TV's are not TV's (they have no tuner).
So it is with this engine. The term "air-breathing rocket engine" is a pretty good description for an engine that carries and can use its own oxidizer, but also can supplement that using outside air when operating at (relatively) low speeds and altitudes.
Ok, he was able to put a 32-node system on an FPGA. You interconnect a few, and you'll have a special-purpose procesor for a couple-hundred-record dataset. That won't do "huge database searches", I'm afraid. Ultra-fast processing of a few hundred records is not impressive.
If you're going to tell me I'm talking out my ass, you might want to do the math first.
I found this original intent of 1 processor = 1 record interesting as well, but more from a "so that's why this isn't around today" standpoint.
In the day it may have sounded like a promising approach. 1M records may have sounded like a big dataset. But today there are two types of dataset -- those so small that a conventional computer can handle them just fine, and those so big that this architecture cannot scale to them. I work in a data warehouse that loads several million records per day.
To be fair, I respect this approach as possibly contributing to the massively-parallel database architecture in Teradata. It, too, works on the premise that a large number of processing elements (it calls them AMPs) each independently handle some of the data -- and in early implementations each AMP was a piece of hardware, kind of like this system. It scales better because each AMP handles an arbitrary subset of the data, not just one record. Each AMP has its own disks, not merely a bit of RAM and a few registers.
Of course a modern computer can simulate a 1980's computer. It would probably take about a day to write a functional simulation in Java.
For that matter, it's not like this computer can do anything that a modern computer can't do in spite of the different architecture. It was designed to do certain things fast, but anything off the shelf today could run circles around these relics regardless of such optimization. (To GP's point -- since the article indicates that he was building to the functional design of the original, it's probably not powerful by today's standards. He may have used faster components than they had back then -- and he obviously used smaller components than they had back then -- but we're not looking at a modern billions-and-billions-of-transistors-on-a-chip optimized-in-ways-you-cannot-comprehend heat-sink-needing CPU.) So once you talk about "what can it do" at a useful level of abstraction, the answer is "nothing all that practical".
But that's not the point, is it? This kind of stuff is a hobby and a fascination to some people. I'm interested enough that I might write a software simulation of the machine, but not interested enough to build one. This guy was interested enough to build one.
It's not like stamp collectors are saving up for a big letter-writing campaign...
That probably depends on jurisdiction, but in general I'd say extortion is a broader term than you think and this could be construed as extortion.
The elements of extortion are typically a threat, intent to take money to which one isn't entitled, and sometimes the actual acquisition of the property as a result of the threat. The question is, does the threat to leave negative reviews visible count?
You appear to be asserting that the threat has to be affirmative in nature -- i.e. "give me what I want, or I will do something to you". But that's not necessarily the case. Threatening to withhold testimony can be extortion; so at least some of the time, the threat can be one of omission -- "give me what I want or I will not do something that would prevent harm to you".
That the threatened action be illegal, or that the harm be unjust by any particular standard, are not typically elements of the crime.