but why wouldn't it be legal for me to rent a flat in nyc and place a dvr in there and stream the end results for my viewing whereever? that's what they do essentially.
If you record an OTA broadcast to a DVD-R and they record an OTA broadcast to a DVD-R it's essentially the same thing, but the broadcaster will have a problem with a company doing that for profit and selling the DVD. It's not the only factors but what you do for private non-commercial use is treated quite different than a public commercial service. Honestly I find it more likely that your private right to fair use would be taken away than their commercial control would be, so I wouldn't be so quick to tie this to the mast of fair use. The whole ship might go down (though of course there's always pirate ships...)
Personally I'm a bit surprised powered USB didn't make it into the consumer market... single cable external disks, printers, scanners and whatnot sounds like a good idea to me.
But they don't everyone goes for.com first and then grabs a.net or a.org if what they want is unavailable.
And this is the real issue, as far as I know.com is now bigger than all the other domains combined and many, many of the other TLDs are bought only to stop squatters. Effectively we already have a flat namespace, if this wasn't such a money grab they could just say all dotcoms (of 3+ letters to not collide with country TLDs) are now TLDs and reassign all the.com DNS servers to TLD DNS servers. It's not like my grocery store has a.com or my university a.edu in the real world, why should they online? No, really... why? MIT and Wal-Mart could coexist just fine without being mit.edu and walmart.com just like they do in the real world. IFF there's a namespace collision pick a better name get a subdomain somewhere... I just don't see the problem.
There's no court that has jurisdiction of the world. Yes, if we're in an US court we could negotiate a worldwide license to end the legal problem here and in every other jurisdiction, but if we don't reach an agreement then I would think US courts decide for the US, German courts decide for Germany and every other country for itself. I wouldn't be surprised if Motorola could sue in German court over damages caused by the US court by interfering with the German court. The lawyers are going to win, that's for sure.
No. If the qualifications to be posted on slashdot is "News for Nerds" OR "Stuff that Matters", the result is that slashdot is a site with "News for Nerds" AND "Stuff that Matters"./nitpick
I sorta can see personal networks function if you're trying to start up a local business, that there's a new restaurant/clothes shop/computer repair shop in town, tell all your friends and family and everyone you know. Apps? Hello, most of them are $1-3 each and you need to be making sales far outside the town your little office is in. And unless it's a competitive game and we're looking for buddies to play, nobody bothers to talk about $1 apps. Besides, most people will know where you work and people take reviews for your own products with a big grain of salt - maybe you got caught up in the rah rahs and drank the koolaid at the office but the rest of the world doesn't agree.
Of course, Blu-ray itself is a piece of utter garbage, and as a result has no chance whatsoever of ever reaching DVD's ubiquity
Why, is there something wrong with the discs themselves? 20 GB more capacity than HD DVD, BD+ looks quite broken, you can get a BluRay player for $60 which is probably far less than the TV will cost you. If there's a reason it's not everywhere it's that
1) Not every place needs HD 2) A lot of old content will never be HD 3) Streaming got popular 4) USB sticks replaced a lot of discs
Even now, sales figures look better than they are purely because it's getting difficult to buy a DVD of a new release without buying it as part of a Blu-ray/DVD bundle.
Like you said, they're doing more and more combo deals now instead of gauging an extra premium out of those who want the BluRay like they used to. Eventually the DVD player will break and because they already have so many BluRays people will get a BluRay player, after all it still plays DVDs. Honestly I'd much rather take broken AACS/BD+ over the overly locked down video DRM. Too bad the movie industry didn't end up like the music industry.
Similarly, if someone says that they're raising money to do one thing, then take the money and immediately do something entirely different with it (e.g. going on a tropical vacation), then they solicited the money under false pretenses, and that's fraud.
Ah, but they only awarded themselves lavish salaries as project managers/team members on a project that failed, then spent that money to go on a tropical vacation. It works for charity frauds at least, even if 95%+ of the funds went away in "administration" they didn't find anything to pin them on legally. The only thing they could do is recommend people only give money to serious organizations that make public account for their finances. This may also be an issue for foundations too if the manager's compensation and costs hasn't been properly regulated.
A public contract is fine, but how would you sign a contract with "the public"? Somebody would have to be the other party to sign off on deliveries, resolve disputes, have a standing to sue if they don't adhere to it and so on. I doubt the charities want to mediate between unhappy contributors and unscrupulous companies and individuals. There's also the chance the person would default on his penalties after spending/running off with the money.
If it's only a fraction of the money a scammer could still take a good haircut out of not delivering, while if it's a full payback a genuine project that's actually spent its money but fails to deliver will be in the hole. If you had that kind of risk money you wouldn't need Kickstarter in the first place. Either way I fear this will end up like class actions, some miserable person will complain, the trustees will find some reason to sue to "protect the investment" and the lawyers are the only ones who win.
Crowdfunding works only together with reputation. If you simply give money to any unknown person who starts a project, then it's your own fault if they run away with it. Reputation means that creators seeking funding need to do their first few projects for free until there are enough fans who believe that the creator will really deliver and who like the quality of the previous products.
Exactly. I donated through Kickstarter to Musopen which was also prominently featured here on slashdot because they were already a registered non-profit and had done quite a bit of work to produce and distribute free music before, not to mention they had a semi-tangible goal. Good thing too, because this was in September 2010 and they didn't get to recording until this January with the Prague Symphony Orchestra - it's now in editing and still not released yet. I'd not give money to any random dude who said he'd do the same and I wouldn't trust them to deliver almost two years down the road.
Of course you still don't have a real guarantee, I don't have a contract, I can't get a refund. But you have to consider the value proposition, for example if a person has worked long and hard on an open source project and asks for Kickstarter funding to work full time on some features. If he goes AWOL then that project is scorched earth, he can't use it as reference anywhere because it'll be full of stories about how he took the money and ran. Same with anyone pursuing any kind of career who'd use it in their portfolio. But people with no proven commitment wanting money up front? No way.
Sounds like a damaged cable, there are signal strength requirements you're supposed to pass. Bought a quite cheap 25 feet cable, only got 720p image and no sound but was nothing visibly wrong about it. Complained, they told me to cut it and send photo and they sent me another, worked perfectly with 1080p and sound. Okay so the cable must work but there's nothing more to be gained, as long as it works it's 100% bit accurate.
Unreasonable expectations are most likely based on the fact you can't drive a hybrid like a traditional car and still expect to get more than minor gas savings. Even then, I mostly see hybrids advertised as 35-45mpg... not a significant improvement over traditional cars of similar size.
Yup. Here you can get a 88 MPG diesel car which is every bit as good as the hybrids with most of the same compromises. If you want cleaner you'll want all-electric with a little emergency helper.
I wouldn't put it on a new machine, but if you have XP-generation hardware there's no need to upgrade. If it was a free upgrade I'd probably suggest everyone go Win7 but I wouldn't spend money on it. And for a lot of people what it does and the hardware they have is enough.
you see some building built, the MEDIA report what they are told and you believe what they say? about such matters, especially? today, I assume 100% of the info we get is 'managed'. I don't trust a thing that comes from 'established' sources. why should I?
Of course you shouldn't trust everything. But it's not like YouTube - which seems to be the place to find "unestablished" sources - is nothing but good honest, unbiased reporting of facts either. What you're saying seems awfully close to saying that the less of an established, credible media institution they are, the more you trust them. Well, there are a lot of people that want to tell you the "truth" about various things and most of them are considered crackpots because they are crackpots. The Army builds tanks, the Navy builds ships, the Air Force builds planes and the NSA builds data centers. Yes, if you go looking for conspiracy theories you'll probably find one saying it's for something else but this doesn't exactly sound like the part they keep secret.
Oh, and it's a newsflash that companies make insane profits on "accessories"?
Not really, but Apple seem to have set a new standard for mark-up and get away with it. I don't know why, but for most other brands people seem happy getting a knock-off but for their iThingie there must be a genuine iAccessory. It's like Apple has flipped the "it's a Mac, it doesn't work with anything else" into "it's an iThingie, it works best with other iThingies" to sell people the whole iStack.
I can believe that, take something as simple as the iPad Smart Cover... it's a very simple folding cover with a couple magnets, yet they want $40/70 for that, buying an extra official cable or charger is also hilariously expensive. Or just look up the prices on the 16/32/64 GB versions of an iPad and compare with the hardware costs, you don't pay $100 for another 16GB anywhere but Apple. Nor to you pay $130 to add a 3G/4G connection, you get complete 3G/4G routers for less than $100. Personally I bought the iPad 16GB wifi-only for $399 recently and I think it was worth it for the excellent display, but all my accessories are 3rd party. Compared to what I've seen with friends that's where they rake in the big bucks.
Not to mention effectively being limited to your town or city, extremely few areas have so dense population you have an unbroken wifi connection to neighboring cities. If they do, those few houses would become an immense choke point. I'd much rather go with a virtual network on top of my regular Internet connection.
There was this extremely funny article about such "sensitive" people complaining about a new cell phone tower that was causing them problems. There was only one problem, the antenna wasn't actually hooked up yet and wasn't broadcasting any signals, yet people reported having problems the moment the antenna came up anyway. As far as I know none of these people have actually managed to detect in studies whether they're kept in a room that's shielded or flooded with EM waves, it's just a mental reaction to thinking they're being exposed.
pressure will not stop and sooner or later, we'll lose what we have become used to. we've had some good internet days during the last decade or two; but the government AND big business have teamed up to ruin it.
Pardon me for saying it, but I've heard the doomsday prediction that the "wild wild west" days of the Internet is coming to a close now since shortly after I got on in the 90s. Double that after 9/11. P2P was going to die after Napster and torrents were going to die after Suprnova and TPB and most recently file hosting was to die with Megaupload. I don't see that any of that has happened. The music industry has given up DRM protection, the video industry is still in denial but BluRay looks to be practically broken so 1080p content will be on P2P for the foreseeable future and we still got root on our PCs and now on Android on the mobile. The world is not full of Trusted Computing and Remote Attestation to get on the Internet that was supposed to be "imminent".
Their legal campaigns have also honestly not scared many, they're consistently meeting opposition in the courts and so are all their "graduated response" aka "three strikes, you're out" laws except France who surrenders as usual. They can't significantly increase the chance of getting caught - particularly with the explosion it people file sharing - and they won't get public support for the death penalty for file sharing. It's gone beyond the point where they can effectively combat in the courts and people generally react badly to that kind of arbitrary, excessive punishment to the small minority that does get caught.
I honestly think they're losing year for year, with a population that is less and less likely to accept these restrictions. They still haven't "tamed" the first generation of online people and for each year a year of young people can vote and old people die out. It takes a long, long time - from first vote to average life span we're talking 60 years or so and we're maybe 15 years into it since Internet got "mainstream". If there was an election today in Germany the Pirate Party would enter parliament (they've already entered two state parliaments), no offense to my neighbors Sweden but that's a 8-9x bigger country and a leading force in the EU, far stronger than two MEPs in the European Parliament. Meanwhile bandwidth gets faster and cheaper, software gets smarter most bills to store traffic data has died on the drawing board.
My impression is also that more than more places are offering customary wifi service, go into any coffee shop, burger joint, pizza place, gas station, buses, trains, airports, airplanes, hotels, motels or pretty much any company office and they have a wifi for you. True, the number of open home wifis may have declined somewhat but overall I'd say your options are more not fewer. Not to mention that with faster connections even using proxies and whatnot slowing them down you still get decent speeds, the content you want is relatively constant in size. Currently I have 60/60 Mbit and in all honestly (and my inner geek screams to accept this) I'd have zero use for a 1000 Mbit line. Okay I'd have to wait a few seconds shorter on the occasions that I do wait but my total downloads would probably not go up at all.
Since once they're out in the working world, they'll find what they're used to already: Windows!
By the time any of them are out in the working world, Microsoft will have gone through several generations of Ribbons and Metro and whatnot other changes. What kids need is to learn to write and structure documents, not the finer points of style and formatting. They need to be able to use their math in spreadsheets, making formulas and chaining them together, not making pretty management reports. That's not to say it won't be important in the future, but that's it's mostly pointless to learn it now to know how it'll be in Word and Excel 2022.
Not to mention fraudulently specifying the utility function to reach a more desired outcome. For example, take a divorce where there's only two goods to be distributed, the house and the money. He loves the house, she hates it. But he knows if he says so he will get little money because he got a lot of utility from the house. So he says he dislikes the house, he'll still get the house as he likes it more than her, but it'll cost him much less utility. Of course in this case the house has an actual market value, but if we're talking personal items that don't really translate well to dollars then this is a real problem.
Well, undersea fiber optic cables which is mostly how you get from continent to continent are ridiculously expensive and if you're a mega-corporation then I can see the value of having an off-continent backup in case India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran or the US and China goes to war. But if you're living in the US and the country is fucked from San Francisco to New York - which is still the same continent - then you probably have bigger issues to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
but why wouldn't it be legal for me to rent a flat in nyc and place a dvr in there and stream the end results for my viewing whereever? that's what they do essentially.
If you record an OTA broadcast to a DVD-R and they record an OTA broadcast to a DVD-R it's essentially the same thing, but the broadcaster will have a problem with a company doing that for profit and selling the DVD. It's not the only factors but what you do for private non-commercial use is treated quite different than a public commercial service. Honestly I find it more likely that your private right to fair use would be taken away than their commercial control would be, so I wouldn't be so quick to tie this to the mast of fair use. The whole ship might go down (though of course there's always pirate ships...)
Personally I'm a bit surprised powered USB didn't make it into the consumer market... single cable external disks, printers, scanners and whatnot sounds like a good idea to me.
But they don't everyone goes for .com first and then grabs a .net or a .org if what they want is unavailable.
And this is the real issue, as far as I know .com is now bigger than all the other domains combined and many, many of the other TLDs are bought only to stop squatters. Effectively we already have a flat namespace, if this wasn't such a money grab they could just say all dotcoms (of 3+ letters to not collide with country TLDs) are now TLDs and reassign all the .com DNS servers to TLD DNS servers. It's not like my grocery store has a .com or my university a .edu in the real world, why should they online? No, really... why? MIT and Wal-Mart could coexist just fine without being mit.edu and walmart.com just like they do in the real world. IFF there's a namespace collision pick a better name get a subdomain somewhere... I just don't see the problem.
There's no court that has jurisdiction of the world. Yes, if we're in an US court we could negotiate a worldwide license to end the legal problem here and in every other jurisdiction, but if we don't reach an agreement then I would think US courts decide for the US, German courts decide for Germany and every other country for itself. I wouldn't be surprised if Motorola could sue in German court over damages caused by the US court by interfering with the German court. The lawyers are going to win, that's for sure.
No. If the qualifications to be posted on slashdot is "News for Nerds" OR "Stuff that Matters", the result is that slashdot is a site with "News for Nerds" AND "Stuff that Matters". /nitpick
I sorta can see personal networks function if you're trying to start up a local business, that there's a new restaurant/clothes shop/computer repair shop in town, tell all your friends and family and everyone you know. Apps? Hello, most of them are $1-3 each and you need to be making sales far outside the town your little office is in. And unless it's a competitive game and we're looking for buddies to play, nobody bothers to talk about $1 apps. Besides, most people will know where you work and people take reviews for your own products with a big grain of salt - maybe you got caught up in the rah rahs and drank the koolaid at the office but the rest of the world doesn't agree.
Of course, Blu-ray itself is a piece of utter garbage, and as a result has no chance whatsoever of ever reaching DVD's ubiquity
Why, is there something wrong with the discs themselves? 20 GB more capacity than HD DVD, BD+ looks quite broken, you can get a BluRay player for $60 which is probably far less than the TV will cost you. If there's a reason it's not everywhere it's that
1) Not every place needs HD
2) A lot of old content will never be HD
3) Streaming got popular
4) USB sticks replaced a lot of discs
Even now, sales figures look better than they are purely because it's getting difficult to buy a DVD of a new release without buying it as part of a Blu-ray/DVD bundle.
Like you said, they're doing more and more combo deals now instead of gauging an extra premium out of those who want the BluRay like they used to. Eventually the DVD player will break and because they already have so many BluRays people will get a BluRay player, after all it still plays DVDs. Honestly I'd much rather take broken AACS/BD+ over the overly locked down video DRM. Too bad the movie industry didn't end up like the music industry.
Similarly, if someone says that they're raising money to do one thing, then take the money and immediately do something entirely different with it (e.g. going on a tropical vacation), then they solicited the money under false pretenses, and that's fraud.
Ah, but they only awarded themselves lavish salaries as project managers/team members on a project that failed, then spent that money to go on a tropical vacation. It works for charity frauds at least, even if 95%+ of the funds went away in "administration" they didn't find anything to pin them on legally. The only thing they could do is recommend people only give money to serious organizations that make public account for their finances. This may also be an issue for foundations too if the manager's compensation and costs hasn't been properly regulated.
A public contract is fine, but how would you sign a contract with "the public"? Somebody would have to be the other party to sign off on deliveries, resolve disputes, have a standing to sue if they don't adhere to it and so on. I doubt the charities want to mediate between unhappy contributors and unscrupulous companies and individuals. There's also the chance the person would default on his penalties after spending/running off with the money.
If it's only a fraction of the money a scammer could still take a good haircut out of not delivering, while if it's a full payback a genuine project that's actually spent its money but fails to deliver will be in the hole. If you had that kind of risk money you wouldn't need Kickstarter in the first place. Either way I fear this will end up like class actions, some miserable person will complain, the trustees will find some reason to sue to "protect the investment" and the lawyers are the only ones who win.
Crowdfunding works only together with reputation. If you simply give money to any unknown person who starts a project, then it's your own fault if they run away with it. Reputation means that creators seeking funding need to do their first few projects for free until there are enough fans who believe that the creator will really deliver and who like the quality of the previous products.
Exactly. I donated through Kickstarter to Musopen which was also prominently featured here on slashdot because they were already a registered non-profit and had done quite a bit of work to produce and distribute free music before, not to mention they had a semi-tangible goal. Good thing too, because this was in September 2010 and they didn't get to recording until this January with the Prague Symphony Orchestra - it's now in editing and still not released yet. I'd not give money to any random dude who said he'd do the same and I wouldn't trust them to deliver almost two years down the road.
Of course you still don't have a real guarantee, I don't have a contract, I can't get a refund. But you have to consider the value proposition, for example if a person has worked long and hard on an open source project and asks for Kickstarter funding to work full time on some features. If he goes AWOL then that project is scorched earth, he can't use it as reference anywhere because it'll be full of stories about how he took the money and ran. Same with anyone pursuing any kind of career who'd use it in their portfolio. But people with no proven commitment wanting money up front? No way.
Sounds like a damaged cable, there are signal strength requirements you're supposed to pass. Bought a quite cheap 25 feet cable, only got 720p image and no sound but was nothing visibly wrong about it. Complained, they told me to cut it and send photo and they sent me another, worked perfectly with 1080p and sound. Okay so the cable must work but there's nothing more to be gained, as long as it works it's 100% bit accurate.
Unreasonable expectations are most likely based on the fact you can't drive a hybrid like a traditional car and still expect to get more than minor gas savings. Even then, I mostly see hybrids advertised as 35-45mpg... not a significant improvement over traditional cars of similar size.
Yup. Here you can get a 88 MPG diesel car which is every bit as good as the hybrids with most of the same compromises. If you want cleaner you'll want all-electric with a little emergency helper.
I wouldn't put it on a new machine, but if you have XP-generation hardware there's no need to upgrade. If it was a free upgrade I'd probably suggest everyone go Win7 but I wouldn't spend money on it. And for a lot of people what it does and the hardware they have is enough.
you see some building built, the MEDIA report what they are told and you believe what they say? about such matters, especially? today, I assume 100% of the info we get is 'managed'. I don't trust a thing that comes from 'established' sources. why should I?
Of course you shouldn't trust everything. But it's not like YouTube - which seems to be the place to find "unestablished" sources - is nothing but good honest, unbiased reporting of facts either. What you're saying seems awfully close to saying that the less of an established, credible media institution they are, the more you trust them. Well, there are a lot of people that want to tell you the "truth" about various things and most of them are considered crackpots because they are crackpots. The Army builds tanks, the Navy builds ships, the Air Force builds planes and the NSA builds data centers. Yes, if you go looking for conspiracy theories you'll probably find one saying it's for something else but this doesn't exactly sound like the part they keep secret.
Oh, and it's a newsflash that companies make insane profits on "accessories"?
Not really, but Apple seem to have set a new standard for mark-up and get away with it. I don't know why, but for most other brands people seem happy getting a knock-off but for their iThingie there must be a genuine iAccessory. It's like Apple has flipped the "it's a Mac, it doesn't work with anything else" into "it's an iThingie, it works best with other iThingies" to sell people the whole iStack.
I can believe that, take something as simple as the iPad Smart Cover... it's a very simple folding cover with a couple magnets, yet they want $40/70 for that, buying an extra official cable or charger is also hilariously expensive. Or just look up the prices on the 16/32/64 GB versions of an iPad and compare with the hardware costs, you don't pay $100 for another 16GB anywhere but Apple. Nor to you pay $130 to add a 3G/4G connection, you get complete 3G/4G routers for less than $100. Personally I bought the iPad 16GB wifi-only for $399 recently and I think it was worth it for the excellent display, but all my accessories are 3rd party. Compared to what I've seen with friends that's where they rake in the big bucks.
Not to mention effectively being limited to your town or city, extremely few areas have so dense population you have an unbroken wifi connection to neighboring cities. If they do, those few houses would become an immense choke point. I'd much rather go with a virtual network on top of my regular Internet connection.
There was this extremely funny article about such "sensitive" people complaining about a new cell phone tower that was causing them problems. There was only one problem, the antenna wasn't actually hooked up yet and wasn't broadcasting any signals, yet people reported having problems the moment the antenna came up anyway. As far as I know none of these people have actually managed to detect in studies whether they're kept in a room that's shielded or flooded with EM waves, it's just a mental reaction to thinking they're being exposed.
pressure will not stop and sooner or later, we'll lose what we have become used to. we've had some good internet days during the last decade or two; but the government AND big business have teamed up to ruin it.
Pardon me for saying it, but I've heard the doomsday prediction that the "wild wild west" days of the Internet is coming to a close now since shortly after I got on in the 90s. Double that after 9/11. P2P was going to die after Napster and torrents were going to die after Suprnova and TPB and most recently file hosting was to die with Megaupload. I don't see that any of that has happened. The music industry has given up DRM protection, the video industry is still in denial but BluRay looks to be practically broken so 1080p content will be on P2P for the foreseeable future and we still got root on our PCs and now on Android on the mobile. The world is not full of Trusted Computing and Remote Attestation to get on the Internet that was supposed to be "imminent".
Their legal campaigns have also honestly not scared many, they're consistently meeting opposition in the courts and so are all their "graduated response" aka "three strikes, you're out" laws except France who surrenders as usual. They can't significantly increase the chance of getting caught - particularly with the explosion it people file sharing - and they won't get public support for the death penalty for file sharing. It's gone beyond the point where they can effectively combat in the courts and people generally react badly to that kind of arbitrary, excessive punishment to the small minority that does get caught.
I honestly think they're losing year for year, with a population that is less and less likely to accept these restrictions. They still haven't "tamed" the first generation of online people and for each year a year of young people can vote and old people die out. It takes a long, long time - from first vote to average life span we're talking 60 years or so and we're maybe 15 years into it since Internet got "mainstream". If there was an election today in Germany the Pirate Party would enter parliament (they've already entered two state parliaments), no offense to my neighbors Sweden but that's a 8-9x bigger country and a leading force in the EU, far stronger than two MEPs in the European Parliament. Meanwhile bandwidth gets faster and cheaper, software gets smarter most bills to store traffic data has died on the drawing board.
My impression is also that more than more places are offering customary wifi service, go into any coffee shop, burger joint, pizza place, gas station, buses, trains, airports, airplanes, hotels, motels or pretty much any company office and they have a wifi for you. True, the number of open home wifis may have declined somewhat but overall I'd say your options are more not fewer. Not to mention that with faster connections even using proxies and whatnot slowing them down you still get decent speeds, the content you want is relatively constant in size. Currently I have 60/60 Mbit and in all honestly (and my inner geek screams to accept this) I'd have zero use for a 1000 Mbit line. Okay I'd have to wait a few seconds shorter on the occasions that I do wait but my total downloads would probably not go up at all.
Since once they're out in the working world, they'll find what they're used to already: Windows!
By the time any of them are out in the working world, Microsoft will have gone through several generations of Ribbons and Metro and whatnot other changes. What kids need is to learn to write and structure documents, not the finer points of style and formatting. They need to be able to use their math in spreadsheets, making formulas and chaining them together, not making pretty management reports. That's not to say it won't be important in the future, but that's it's mostly pointless to learn it now to know how it'll be in Word and Excel 2022.
Well they also need to have celestial bodies, each to his own but I wouldn't describe those as heavenly...
Not to mention fraudulently specifying the utility function to reach a more desired outcome. For example, take a divorce where there's only two goods to be distributed, the house and the money. He loves the house, she hates it. But he knows if he says so he will get little money because he got a lot of utility from the house. So he says he dislikes the house, he'll still get the house as he likes it more than her, but it'll cost him much less utility. Of course in this case the house has an actual market value, but if we're talking personal items that don't really translate well to dollars then this is a real problem.
Well, undersea fiber optic cables which is mostly how you get from continent to continent are ridiculously expensive and if you're a mega-corporation then I can see the value of having an off-continent backup in case India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran or the US and China goes to war. But if you're living in the US and the country is fucked from San Francisco to New York - which is still the same continent - then you probably have bigger issues to deal with.
And of course when I make a snarky remark I also make a copy-paste fail. Yes, I should have used the preview button...
If they're applying for a patent, it means that they must have some sufficiently viable method of producing the tech.
No geniuses found in parent post....