The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system, with higher taxes for the high-earners so that everyone has a fair share of the increased productivity.
This is not the only solution - although you are right that we need to give more people a share in the economy. Our society needs to recognize that highly productive people work too much and would be happier if the worked less and earned less. Yes, one of the world's elite business schools says that productive people work too much.
We have become much more productive—output per hour worked increased more than fourfold between 1950 and 2012... In the United States, the average working year went from 1,963 hours in 1950 to 1,790 hours last year, a drop of less than 10%.
Research shows that highly productive people would be far happier (and still have plenty of economic security) if they worked fewer hours. If the amount of work to do doesn't change, the economy has room for more workers.
I think that a better solution to taxation changes is for the government to change employment law - no more exemptions for overtime. All employees should receive overtime pay if they work more than X number of hours in a week. Period. The X number of hours should be indexed to productivity measures so that it changes in step with the productivity levels of our economy.
Of course, his saving grace is he didn't see fit to punish her with a Surface, at least.
Yes, MS screwed up the original Surface sales projections so badly that their corrected sales projections (and thus manufacturing capacity) for the Surface 2 are so low that they cannot meet demand. Have you been under a rock? This has been in all the financial press as a huge negative for their revenue and profit numbers.
So... Bill Gates isn't going to be giving away some device when there is a line of people waiting to buy it.
Those figures are a load of bullshit...(y)ou just try feeding a teenage boy on less than $1,000 a year.
The linked wikipedia entry that you are calling bullshit allocates ~$2500 per year for food for a middle class teenager. You may want to pay a bit more attention.
I'm in the same boat as you. I have the same year MBP as you, but I have the 15" and I went out of my way to get a matte screen on it. And THOSE are no longer available, which is MY biggest problem. Those retina screens are all glossy.
I have the early-2011 15" MBP and paid for the matte upgrade as well as the higher resolution screen (standard was 1440 x 900 and the optional is 1680 x 1050).
I just recently purchased the 15" rMBP and while I would prefer matte instead of glossy, I'm never going back. The display is just that good. I'll be sure to ask for a premium price when I sell the old MBP. It's nice to know that it is in demand.
Get yourself a Mini-DisplayPort cable and press a keyboard combination. Your 27" iMac just turned into a 27" Thunderbolt Cinema Display for another box that has DisplayPort output.
Sometimes Apple fails to properly advertise some nice features, such as this. Target Display Mode actually makes me more likely to buy an iMac the next time I need to buy a computer. If it can work with my wife's ThinkPad and an Intel NUC running Linux, I'm sold.
I have used Target Disk Mode on a few Apple laptops in the past, which was also a very nice feature.
The linked article has a follow-on FAQ that you can click over to. That answers the question.
It's protection money. If Southwest Airlines buys the ad, Google won't put other advertising up. If they don't, any other advertiser is welcome to pay Google money to put up a text ad above the search result.
If I go to Google and search for Southwest Airlines, I plan to visit the Southwest Airlines website. Why would Southwest Airlines pay money to Google for an advertisement that tries to get me to visit the Southwest Airlines website?
he's only broken his collarbone twice and hip once
Only? That sounds like proof of concept rather than a proof of overstatement.
If you were to see the actual quote, you may feel differently:
Dr. Pruitt cites his own example. Now 62, he was a bicycle racer and has been riding for the past four decades. He covers 5,000 to 10,000 miles a year.
In all that time, he has had four serious crashes. He broke his collarbone twice while racing and had two crashes on a mountain bike, breaking a hip one time and spraining a wrist the other.
This is a clever ruse on Linus' part. The real issue, which he completely ignores, is the genuine threat to Linux provided by Microsoft's release of a free Windows 8.1 upgrade.
Even if he doesn't want to talk about it, at least publicly, I know he's scared shitless.
Windows 8.1 was a free update to Windows 8 machines. If you don't have Windows 8 installed, you need to pay for Windows 8.1.
If Microsoft continues to offer updates at no cost, then eventually all (or close enough to be considered all) Microsoft users will be able to get free updates. But that is going to be many years from now, and Microsoft will still need to convince OEMs to ship machines with a valid copy of Windows as the OS. If they give that away for free, then it would definitely represent a challenge for desktop Linux adoption, especially outside the US and Europe.
You're not a real programmer if you can't adapt to the lack of unsigned variables.
Forget about being a "real programmer" and focus on being a "real developer.' There are functional requirements and then there are technical requirements. Functionally speaking, how important is it to have an unsigned data type rather than having the equivalent data type and enforcing a "no negative values" rule? I'm not sure I can think of any, aside from the case of being able to interpret unsigned data types for interoperability. But that says nothing about the need for the actual storage of that data.
I'm pretty sure that some respected Computer Scientist said something about premature optimization....... It's a good rule. Focus on meeting the functional requirements of the system you are developing, and then optimize where it makes sense. I don't think you are going to notice the lack of unsigned data types. But if you really need them, perhaps that should be a signal that a lower-level language is more appropriate for that particular component in the system.
Am I going to look at those patent numbers? No ! I don't want to get get a migraine headache since many modern IT patents are written in "legalese" such that someone with a Professional Engineering (yes a real one) background who is actually conversant with the field has a hard time understanding the words. Of course the opposite applies since most legal people can understand the words but not the context.
That's ridiculous. To be allowed to even take the patent bar exam, a person must have an engineering or hard science degree from an accredited university or can demonstrate that their combination of college courses and work experience are the equivalent. Having or not having a law degree is completely irrelevant.
I have read a large number of software, hardware and automotive patents and am convinced that any moderately smart high school student can understand perfectly as long as they pay attention to detail and can read. every. word. I am also convinced that calling a lot of this stuff an "invention" is being overly generous.
If the price is $3 per episode, why bother paying $23 for 8 episodes... to save $1?
Convenience. When you buy a season pass in iTunes and say "yes" to all of the questions, your computer will automatically download each new episode as soon as it becomes available. You will also receive a notification that your new episode is ready to watch.
Microsoft decided the tablet and the PC were exactly identical, and made one the other at the cost of both.
Apple and Google treat tablets as large phones. Microsoft treats tablets as small PCs.
Neither approach is incorrect, however Microsoft executed very poorly. If the market allows them enough time (and this may or may not happen), they will eventually get it right. I hope they do - it will be very interesting to see how the market reacts. iOS vs Android is a choice between two competing implementations of a computing concept. Windows RT is a competing computing concept.
When I am on a Windows 7 if I am thinking of something I wrote 3 years ago I just hit th windows key and type acme sales 2010 and enter to find the documents. Beagle under Linux tried similiar functionalty.
That's exactly how Windows 8 works. The windows key takes you to the metro desktop and when you type something on the metro desktop Windows 8 assumes you are trying to find something (why else would you type something at the metro desktop) and does a search for what you've typed.
Well, except that on Windows 8 you don't have to hit enter. It starts searching as soon as you start typing, so you would have probably found your document by the type you wrote "acme"
Or they got exactly what they wanted: market penetration. The majority of happy Android users will have no problem upgrading to a closed Chrome Mobile as long as they get keep their apps...
I don't think that closed vs open is what Google cares about. What they are seeing is that handset makers are replacing Google services with their own and that means that Google is paying for the OS development but not getting anything in return. Google thought that forcing the handset manufacturers to keep Google services on the phone in exchange for access to the very latest versions of Android would be more than enough - every iPhone user can't wait to get the latest version of iOS. But it turns out the the handset makers are doing perfectly fine selling phones with old versions of Android and the users don't seem to care.
The future Nexus (which probably wont survive) and Motorola devices will be running Chrome OS and will have no possible way to rid themselves of Google services. They will probably also be able to keep their apps in exactly the same manner as you describe. It's all the other handset makers that Google plans to kill. They have bet the farm on Android. In a few years, the smartphone landscape is going to be Apple with iOS, Nokia with WP, Motorola with Chrome OS, and... HTC/Samsung/others with a completely outdated Android that gets zero support from Google.
Queru is gone. Rubin is gone. The Chromecast, whose original and main purpose was to get Android devices connected to external displays, ran Android in prototype builds but was released with Chrome OS. Look who runs the Android group now... The head of the Chrome OS group, who is still the head of the Chrome OS group.
I'd give it no more than 2 years before the Nexus & Motorola products are released with Chrome OS and Android is 3rd-party device only with all Google services removed.
Face it, Google just isn't getting what they wanted out of the platform.
I can just imagine in a Russian voice "give us all your food or we drop nukes".
I see that you are equating Putin's maturity level with my 4-year old child, who is going through a phase in which he destroys the things he wants when he is not allowed to have them. My tactic has been to calmly explain that I was saving the cookie for after dinner but now that he has destroyed it he will get no cookie after dinner. I think he is starting to understand and am pretty confident that long before age 5 he won't be destroying cookies anymore.
I don't have any knowledge of Putin's age but I am pretty sure that he is an adult and if ~50 years of cold war brinksmanship has taught us anything it is that Russian leadership acts like rational adults when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons.
Indeed. Such as LibreOffice, which is (I read) in active development, and available in pre-alpha form for Android already.
Are you suggesting that people should choose a pre-alpha version of an office suite over the Microsoft offering, or are you suggesting that they wait to type up their documents until LibreOffice is available as a 1.0 release?
I'm not sure I quite understand the appeal of the device.
For the same amount of money, you can get an actual business-rugged laptop with [stuff] and 10+ hours of real-world battery life.
And it'll even come with a working hinge, allowing you to use it in places where you don't have a flat surface to put it on, unlike the Surface (Pro)...
Yes, it'll be bigger and heavier in most cases, but other than that?
Care to point out those alternatives at the same price? The Surface Pro has a 1080p screen with a 10-point multitouch sensor that works pretty nicely with the included multifunction stylus (it has two buttons on it). It does have flaws, for sure, but when it first came out I did quite a bit of searching and decided that it was a bargain for that hardware. The OS... well that's a personal choice, but MS made it trivial to turn off secure boot and put your favorite Linux distro on.
It's all about the money. The SF airport officials want their cut of the fares and are bullying the rideshare cabs to get it.
Yes, it is all about the money and no, it's not pure extortion. I don't know if you've noticed, but it costs a lot of money to build an airport and it costs a lot of money to run an airport. Some of that money comes from general taxes that all people pay, but most of the money comes from charging fees to users of the airport.
Everybody that uses the airport pays a fee. The airlines who use the airport to run a business, the airline passengers who use the airport to travel, the taxi drivers who use the airport to run a business, the livery service drivers who use the airport to run a business, the concessionaires who use the airport to run a business. Privately owned vehicles driven by private owners have always been exempted because they are just ancillary to getting the paying airline passengers to and from the airport.
These new "ridesharing" services are attempting to be private individuals when it suits them best and businessmen when it suits them best. SFO is calling them out on their BS and rightly so. If the "ridesharing" services win, the next step will be to either put a toll booth at the entrance and make everyone pay, or increase the general taxes so everyone pays. They will get their money.
I think in this case, people are pointing out their conclusions also apply to free software.
I don't believe the BSA is suddenly saying free software is good for the economy, that's someone else's conclusions.
Software is good for the economy, whether it is free or not. When it comes to businesses (the B in BSA), no software is without cost. Businesses buy support contracts and some may even pay third parties for training. The support contracts in particular pay for a lot of free software development.
Makes you wonder what's wrong with the Great Lakes route which is presumably much shorter.
To use the Great Lakes route (as they are currently used), the magnet would be required to go out into the open ocean, go around Cape Cod and the rest of Massachusetts, go around Nova Scotia and into the St Lawrence Seaway, which would then allow it to enter Lake Ontario, go through the Welland Canal into Lake Erie, and on and on to Chicago. The open ocean is what is going to kill it.
The chosen route will almost certainly be through the intracoastal waterway which requires very little open ocean travel - and that can be planned for especially calm days.
But alas, the real question is why the route does not involve the Erie Canal (which is still in operation!), which could certainly accommodate something of this size. They could head up the Hudson River to Albany and then take the canal to Buffalo on Lake Erie, bypassing the ocean altogether. Perhaps they really are concerned about the waves in the Great Lakes.
To me it's a bit like selling a four door car where the back doors are only for decoration and actually opening and closing the doors are not supported but I guess if you have enough lawyers and impenetrable contracts anything is possible.
That was the Jeep Cherokee if you ever took it off-road. People loved them.
1. If it's already being done in the real world, doing it on a computer is not patentable per se.
2. Doing a simulation of a real-world item is similarly not patentable per se.
3. Doing something wirelessly formerly done over a network, or remotely formerly done locally, or on a lil' phone or tablet or tricorder, is also not patentable per se.
4. This is not to say particularly clever implementations (the "machine" part of "virtual machine") could not be patented.
There, follow those rules, cowardly Congress, and you protect patentable innovation while eviscerating a ton of current patent problems.
Ugh.
I keep seeing things like this on Slashdot. We are all for "plain english" laws that are easy to understand even without a law degree. Yet absolutely nothing in your recommendations fit. How on earth is anyone supposed to interpret "not patentable per se" and "you can't patent it unless it is particularly clever"? WTF? This is not helpful. You want to know how to make the patent situation worse? Add a bunch of new, incredibly vague laws.
Unless you can write up your suggestions in a manner in which every single graduate of a US high school comes to the same conclusion after reading your law, you are not helping things. I know that you are smart and would be the best, most impartial federal judge that was ever yet appointed, but perhaps you should reconsider how easy it is to solve the problems we face.
Slashdot Mirror
The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system, with higher taxes for the high-earners so that everyone has a fair share of the increased productivity.
This is not the only solution - although you are right that we need to give more people a share in the economy. Our society needs to recognize that highly productive people work too much and would be happier if the worked less and earned less. Yes, one of the world's elite business schools says that productive people work too much.
We have become much more productive—output per hour worked increased more than fourfold between 1950 and 2012... In the United States, the average working year went from 1,963 hours in 1950 to 1,790 hours last year, a drop of less than 10%.
Research shows that highly productive people would be far happier (and still have plenty of economic security) if they worked fewer hours. If the amount of work to do doesn't change, the economy has room for more workers.
I think that a better solution to taxation changes is for the government to change employment law - no more exemptions for overtime. All employees should receive overtime pay if they work more than X number of hours in a week. Period. The X number of hours should be indexed to productivity measures so that it changes in step with the productivity levels of our economy.
Of course, his saving grace is he didn't see fit to punish her with a Surface, at least.
Yes, MS screwed up the original Surface sales projections so badly that their corrected sales projections (and thus manufacturing capacity) for the Surface 2 are so low that they cannot meet demand. Have you been under a rock? This has been in all the financial press as a huge negative for their revenue and profit numbers.
So... Bill Gates isn't going to be giving away some device when there is a line of people waiting to buy it.
Those figures are a load of bullshit...(y)ou just try feeding a teenage boy on less than $1,000 a year.
The linked wikipedia entry that you are calling bullshit allocates ~$2500 per year for food for a middle class teenager. You may want to pay a bit more attention.
I'm in the same boat as you. I have the same year MBP as you, but I have the 15" and I went out of my way to get a matte screen on it. And THOSE are no longer available, which is MY biggest problem. Those retina screens are all glossy.
I have the early-2011 15" MBP and paid for the matte upgrade as well as the higher resolution screen (standard was 1440 x 900 and the optional is 1680 x 1050).
I just recently purchased the 15" rMBP and while I would prefer matte instead of glossy, I'm never going back. The display is just that good. I'll be sure to ask for a premium price when I sell the old MBP. It's nice to know that it is in demand.
It does.
Get yourself a Mini-DisplayPort cable and press a keyboard combination. Your 27" iMac just turned into a 27" Thunderbolt Cinema Display for another box that has DisplayPort output.
Sometimes Apple fails to properly advertise some nice features, such as this. Target Display Mode actually makes me more likely to buy an iMac the next time I need to buy a computer. If it can work with my wife's ThinkPad and an Intel NUC running Linux, I'm sold.
I have used Target Disk Mode on a few Apple laptops in the past, which was also a very nice feature.
The linked article has a follow-on FAQ that you can click over to. That answers the question.
It's protection money. If Southwest Airlines buys the ad, Google won't put other advertising up. If they don't, any other advertiser is welcome to pay Google money to put up a text ad above the search result.
If I go to Google and search for Southwest Airlines, I plan to visit the Southwest Airlines website. Why would Southwest Airlines pay money to Google for an advertisement that tries to get me to visit the Southwest Airlines website?
he's only broken his collarbone twice and hip once
Only? That sounds like proof of concept rather than a proof of overstatement.
If you were to see the actual quote, you may feel differently:
Dr. Pruitt cites his own example. Now 62, he was a bicycle racer and has been riding for the past four decades. He covers 5,000 to 10,000 miles a year.
In all that time, he has had four serious crashes. He broke his collarbone twice while racing and had two crashes on a mountain bike, breaking a hip one time and spraining a wrist the other.
This is a worthless data point.
This is a clever ruse on Linus' part. The real issue, which he completely ignores, is the genuine threat to Linux provided by Microsoft's release of a free Windows 8.1 upgrade.
Even if he doesn't want to talk about it, at least publicly, I know he's scared shitless.
Windows 8.1 was a free update to Windows 8 machines. If you don't have Windows 8 installed, you need to pay for Windows 8.1.
If Microsoft continues to offer updates at no cost, then eventually all (or close enough to be considered all) Microsoft users will be able to get free updates. But that is going to be many years from now, and Microsoft will still need to convince OEMs to ship machines with a valid copy of Windows as the OS. If they give that away for free, then it would definitely represent a challenge for desktop Linux adoption, especially outside the US and Europe.
You're not a real programmer if you can't adapt to the lack of unsigned variables.
Forget about being a "real programmer" and focus on being a "real developer.' There are functional requirements and then there are technical requirements. Functionally speaking, how important is it to have an unsigned data type rather than having the equivalent data type and enforcing a "no negative values" rule? I'm not sure I can think of any, aside from the case of being able to interpret unsigned data types for interoperability. But that says nothing about the need for the actual storage of that data.
I'm pretty sure that some respected Computer Scientist said something about premature optimization....... It's a good rule. Focus on meeting the functional requirements of the system you are developing, and then optimize where it makes sense. I don't think you are going to notice the lack of unsigned data types. But if you really need them, perhaps that should be a signal that a lower-level language is more appropriate for that particular component in the system.
Anyone who isnt using a SSD by now for at least their boot drive is stuck in the past.
My spinning platter drive allows me to spend far more time in the present.
Am I going to look at those patent numbers? No ! I don't want to get get a migraine headache since many modern IT patents are written in "legalese" such that someone with a Professional Engineering (yes a real one) background who is actually conversant with the field has a hard time understanding the words. Of course the opposite applies since most legal people can understand the words but not the context.
That's ridiculous. To be allowed to even take the patent bar exam, a person must have an engineering or hard science degree from an accredited university or can demonstrate that their combination of college courses and work experience are the equivalent. Having or not having a law degree is completely irrelevant.
I have read a large number of software, hardware and automotive patents and am convinced that any moderately smart high school student can understand perfectly as long as they pay attention to detail and can read. every. word. I am also convinced that calling a lot of this stuff an "invention" is being overly generous.
If the price is $3 per episode, why bother paying $23 for 8 episodes... to save $1?
Convenience. When you buy a season pass in iTunes and say "yes" to all of the questions, your computer will automatically download each new episode as soon as it becomes available. You will also receive a notification that your new episode is ready to watch.
Microsoft decided the tablet and the PC were exactly identical, and made one the other at the cost of both.
Apple and Google treat tablets as large phones.
Microsoft treats tablets as small PCs.
Neither approach is incorrect, however Microsoft executed very poorly. If the market allows them enough time (and this may or may not happen), they will eventually get it right. I hope they do - it will be very interesting to see how the market reacts. iOS vs Android is a choice between two competing implementations of a computing concept. Windows RT is a competing computing concept.
When I am on a Windows 7 if I am thinking of something I wrote 3 years ago I just hit th windows key and type acme sales 2010 and enter to find the documents. Beagle under Linux tried similiar functionalty.
That's exactly how Windows 8 works. The windows key takes you to the metro desktop and when you type something on the metro desktop Windows 8 assumes you are trying to find something (why else would you type something at the metro desktop) and does a search for what you've typed.
Well, except that on Windows 8 you don't have to hit enter. It starts searching as soon as you start typing, so you would have probably found your document by the type you wrote "acme"
Or they got exactly what they wanted: market penetration. The majority of happy Android users will have no problem upgrading to a closed Chrome Mobile as long as they get keep their apps...
I don't think that closed vs open is what Google cares about. What they are seeing is that handset makers are replacing Google services with their own and that means that Google is paying for the OS development but not getting anything in return. Google thought that forcing the handset manufacturers to keep Google services on the phone in exchange for access to the very latest versions of Android would be more than enough - every iPhone user can't wait to get the latest version of iOS. But it turns out the the handset makers are doing perfectly fine selling phones with old versions of Android and the users don't seem to care.
The future Nexus (which probably wont survive) and Motorola devices will be running Chrome OS and will have no possible way to rid themselves of Google services. They will probably also be able to keep their apps in exactly the same manner as you describe. It's all the other handset makers that Google plans to kill. They have bet the farm on Android. In a few years, the smartphone landscape is going to be Apple with iOS, Nokia with WP, Motorola with Chrome OS, and... HTC/Samsung/others with a completely outdated Android that gets zero support from Google.
Read between the lines.
Queru is gone. Rubin is gone. The Chromecast, whose original and main purpose was to get Android devices connected to external displays, ran Android in prototype builds but was released with Chrome OS. Look who runs the Android group now... The head of the Chrome OS group, who is still the head of the Chrome OS group.
I'd give it no more than 2 years before the Nexus & Motorola products are released with Chrome OS and Android is 3rd-party device only with all Google services removed.
Face it, Google just isn't getting what they wanted out of the platform.
I can just imagine in a Russian voice "give us all your food or we drop nukes".
I see that you are equating Putin's maturity level with my 4-year old child, who is going through a phase in which he destroys the things he wants when he is not allowed to have them. My tactic has been to calmly explain that I was saving the cookie for after dinner but now that he has destroyed it he will get no cookie after dinner. I think he is starting to understand and am pretty confident that long before age 5 he won't be destroying cookies anymore.
I don't have any knowledge of Putin's age but I am pretty sure that he is an adult and if ~50 years of cold war brinksmanship has taught us anything it is that Russian leadership acts like rational adults when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons.
Indeed. Such as LibreOffice, which is (I read) in active development, and available in pre-alpha form for Android already.
Are you suggesting that people should choose a pre-alpha version of an office suite over the Microsoft offering, or are you suggesting that they wait to type up their documents until LibreOffice is available as a 1.0 release?
I'm not sure I quite understand the appeal of the device.
For the same amount of money, you can get an actual business-rugged laptop with [stuff] and 10+ hours of real-world battery life.
And it'll even come with a working hinge, allowing you to use it in places where you don't have a flat surface to put it on, unlike the Surface (Pro)...
Yes, it'll be bigger and heavier in most cases, but other than that?
Care to point out those alternatives at the same price? The Surface Pro has a 1080p screen with a 10-point multitouch sensor that works pretty nicely with the included multifunction stylus (it has two buttons on it). It does have flaws, for sure, but when it first came out I did quite a bit of searching and decided that it was a bargain for that hardware. The OS... well that's a personal choice, but MS made it trivial to turn off secure boot and put your favorite Linux distro on.
It's all about the money. The SF airport officials want their cut of the fares and are bullying the rideshare cabs to get it.
Yes, it is all about the money and no, it's not pure extortion. I don't know if you've noticed, but it costs a lot of money to build an airport and it costs a lot of money to run an airport. Some of that money comes from general taxes that all people pay, but most of the money comes from charging fees to users of the airport.
Everybody that uses the airport pays a fee. The airlines who use the airport to run a business, the airline passengers who use the airport to travel, the taxi drivers who use the airport to run a business, the livery service drivers who use the airport to run a business, the concessionaires who use the airport to run a business. Privately owned vehicles driven by private owners have always been exempted because they are just ancillary to getting the paying airline passengers to and from the airport.
These new "ridesharing" services are attempting to be private individuals when it suits them best and businessmen when it suits them best. SFO is calling them out on their BS and rightly so. If the "ridesharing" services win, the next step will be to either put a toll booth at the entrance and make everyone pay, or increase the general taxes so everyone pays. They will get their money.
I think in this case, people are pointing out their conclusions also apply to free software.
I don't believe the BSA is suddenly saying free software is good for the economy, that's someone else's conclusions.
Software is good for the economy, whether it is free or not. When it comes to businesses (the B in BSA), no software is without cost. Businesses buy support contracts and some may even pay third parties for training. The support contracts in particular pay for a lot of free software development.
Makes you wonder what's wrong with the Great Lakes route which is presumably much shorter.
To use the Great Lakes route (as they are currently used), the magnet would be required to go out into the open ocean, go around Cape Cod and the rest of Massachusetts, go around Nova Scotia and into the St Lawrence Seaway, which would then allow it to enter Lake Ontario, go through the Welland Canal into Lake Erie, and on and on to Chicago. The open ocean is what is going to kill it.
The chosen route will almost certainly be through the intracoastal waterway which requires very little open ocean travel - and that can be planned for especially calm days.
But alas, the real question is why the route does not involve the Erie Canal (which is still in operation!), which could certainly accommodate something of this size. They could head up the Hudson River to Albany and then take the canal to Buffalo on Lake Erie, bypassing the ocean altogether. Perhaps they really are concerned about the waves in the Great Lakes.
To me it's a bit like selling a four door car where the back doors are only for decoration and actually opening and closing the doors are not supported but I guess if you have enough lawyers and impenetrable contracts anything is possible.
That was the Jeep Cherokee if you ever took it off-road. People loved them.
I keep recommending these rules:
1. If it's already being done in the real world, doing it on a computer is not patentable per se.
2. Doing a simulation of a real-world item is similarly not patentable per se.
3. Doing something wirelessly formerly done over a network, or remotely formerly done locally, or on a lil' phone or tablet or tricorder, is also not patentable per se.
4. This is not to say particularly clever implementations (the "machine" part of "virtual machine") could not be patented.
There, follow those rules, cowardly Congress, and you protect patentable innovation while eviscerating a ton of current patent problems.
Ugh.
I keep seeing things like this on Slashdot. We are all for "plain english" laws that are easy to understand even without a law degree. Yet absolutely nothing in your recommendations fit. How on earth is anyone supposed to interpret "not patentable per se" and "you can't patent it unless it is particularly clever"? WTF? This is not helpful. You want to know how to make the patent situation worse? Add a bunch of new, incredibly vague laws.
Unless you can write up your suggestions in a manner in which every single graduate of a US high school comes to the same conclusion after reading your law, you are not helping things. I know that you are smart and would be the best, most impartial federal judge that was ever yet appointed, but perhaps you should reconsider how easy it is to solve the problems we face.