The "Apple Fan Boy" comment was too far on my part.
Clearly the iPhone can be innovative and a market changer without any particular aspect of the device being deserving of a patent, no? If there is a patent on some truly innovative of the iPhone, what is it? Isn't the iPhone truly inventive, even if it does infringe on Samsung's patents?
I am sorry to have offended you, as my biting words were intended for the current system of patents, not at you. Perhaps we are even in agreement.
You are claiming that the iPhone was "inventive", while I am claiming that it is, legally, just a collection of mostly obvious tweaks on existing technology. If all you meant was to be an Apple Fan Boy, that the iPhone is a wonderful step up from previous phones, well you are right. My reply had little to do with you.
If you were intending your statement to mean that the iPhone deserves patent protection because of its impact in the market, then my reply certainly addresses that position. My original statement makes the claim that the patents filed in support of the iPhone by Apple, and those infringed upon by Apple, are not really Inventions for the most part. They are, patent by patent, mostly obvious progressions most would make as being experts in the field.
The thing that is truly inventive about the iPhone, its execution and configuration and marketing, this is not really covered by a patent. It may be the true invention, but it hasn't anything to do with the subject at hand, and that is patents for inventions. What Apple did with the iPhone isn't something one can patent anyway, because how can I reduce the value and impact of the iPhone to a set of figures and claims?
This isn't a problem, in my opinion, as regardless of patents, other companies have a hard time replicating what Apple does, even when they have a "patent advantage" to leverage. This is because there is a huge gap between what a patent can cover, and the execution of an idea.
I will be honest, I can't find a citation. But a search of early patents did not yield any examples of patents in the 1700's that covered features of a product as opposed to an identifiable product. It would be very interesting to find the first example of a product covered by multiple patents over multiple features.
But on a common sense note, there isn't any way the framers of the constitution could have anticipated the complexity of modern products like smart phones. The idea that a single product you can hold in your hand could literally have thousands (if not millions) of potentially patentable features couldn't possibly been something they anticipated.
You neatly sidestep the fact that the iPhone, on delivery, infringed on patents owned by Samsung, Motorola, RIM, Palm, IBM, Microsoft, LG, Nokia, and many others.
The original framers of the constitution imagined an invention to be just that, a new device for which a patent could describe and protect. You trot out mini vans and the iPhone as examples of "inventions". However, there isn't any way either of these were ever protected by "A Patent". Because neither were ever considered "AN Invention".
No, unlike what the framers of the constitution could have ever understood, the iPhone incorporates thousands upon thousands of component ideas, many of which are covered by multiple patents owned by literally hundreds of different parties. It isn't "An Invention". It is the embodiment of so many "inventions" from so many sources that it would truly be impossible to define them all.
And let us not forget that Apple never did have the rights to use all the technology in the iPhone, and they still do not have the rights to use the technology in the iPhone.
So (assuming that you think Patents are good) doesn't this mean we have the iPhone *despite* patents? And if that is true, then is it not also true that if we really followed the letter of the law on Patents, we wouldn't even have iPhones today?
So why exactly would you oppose reform where we mostly throw out patents altogether?
In fact, *Nobody* can produce a smart phone without infringing on *Somebody's* patents.
You want IP reform? Take EVERY infringing product off the market. Let's see congress and the Executive branch do without their Blackberries and their iPhones. It is stupid to allow the thousands upon thousands of bogus patents to be used as a patent thicket to protect a few big companies. These are NOT inventions, in the sense viewed by the framers of the constitution. Most are little minor tweaks obvious to anyone working in the industry. But the costs to consumers in more expensive products and less competition and slowed innovation is huge and vast.
It is time we limit tech patents to 3 years. But regardless of the reform, reform is needed.
Alan Turing demonstrated (through what was a thought experiment) the very nature of computation. His contributions stand head and shoulders over any other computational theorist, ever.
Turing machines model computation while striping away all the artifacts required to really build a computer system. At the same time, they demonstrate and prove that there isn't any difference between the results of a computer, and a computer simulating a computer. In one paper he provided us with the model to understand how to build computers, and how to write really fun movies (Matrix, Total Recall, and many others)
A toast to you, Alan! You are loved, and you are missed!
Not a pyramid scheme. Early adopters only have the advantage of position, i.e. they bought early. This is the same with real estate, same with stocks, same with gold, and any other resource that has been generally available but has gone up in value.
The rest of your points have nothing to do with pyramid schemes, even if they are valid complaints.
.5 % of your customers.... with the *biggest* mouths.
Besides, have you not ever used one of Motorola's phones? I got the Atrix and it is *broken* as it ships. Nothing works. My Nexus one? It has its faults, but it works.
I would kill to boot Motorola's crap on the Atrix. Others (even people with no technical skills) can appreciate what it is like to use a phone that *works* verses using a phone that has been purposely (even if not intentionality) broken.
I'd say dedicated devices for video (i.e. T.V. and blueray players). Set top boxes are also somewhat silly and limited. What we really need are small computer systems for entertainment that use gestures and a Minority Report-like UI. All of this needs to be open source, so we don't have to suck on idiotic interfaces and features sets that cow tow to the entertainment industry's idea of a great set of features (i.e. no time shifting, no space shifting, and pay through the nose).
True, I misread the numbers. Apple "only" made 6 billion after taxes in Q2. I wonder where that profit went? From their call:
"Turning to cash. Our cash for short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $65.8 billion at the end of the March quarter compared to $59.7 billion at the end of the December quarter, a sequential increase of $6.1 billion."
So exactly how many jobs are going to be generated by the profits? How much is going to be paid in taxes? My guess.... very very few, and very very little.
This is why we need to tax the Super Rich and tax the Super Rich Corporations. This wealth is going into just a few pockets. Yeah, my 401k is going to get some, and being an Engineer, it is going to be nice compared to most. But the Super Rich (People worth more than 30 million or some such) are going to take a whale of a lot more. And those even richer (say 100 million or more) will get a whale of a lot more than that. I wonder about the billionaires? Yep, there are bigger whales yet!
I have no problem rewarding people for success. And some of that success is the proper management of wealth. But there should be limits. Increasingly, the game is rigged in favor of the rich. And that is demonstrated by companies that make these kinds of profits, and hand their workers (them people working hard for their success) a bone to go bury in the backyard while piling ever increasing funds into investments to insure that their slice is going to be just that much bigger come the next profit announcement.
--We have tried trickle down; Let's give trickle up a shot.
I did a search, and can't seem to find this vital information. I *assume* this is Eastern Standard Time (as Washington D.C. is on the East Coast), but on the other hand, it seemed most of the action occurred on the West Coast (buying us all three more hours).
The Internet is supposed to be only for looking at web pages, no access to actual video or audio content. Want to play a multi-user game? Ha! Not if significant network traffic is required!
250 GB limits on their AT&T U-verse connection (does not apply to your cable subscription). Some have reported upwards of 4000% errors on their data meter (when AT&T's numbers are compared to those collected by DD-WRT routers).
2 GB limits on their data plans for smart phones.
Obviously they already prevent any pre-paid access to the Internet.
I never did hear if they ever disabled the fiber optic splitter they installed so all their traffic went directly to the NSA.
Seriously, these guys are the biggest threats to the Internet yet.
Somewhere around 2015 to 2020, at our current rate of advances over the last 40 years, we can expect to have storage devices that hold Peta-Bytes of storage. (http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/20/petabyte-disks-coming-in-5-years/) That's a 1000 TB drives for the same cost as your TB drive today.
Yes, streaming from the cloud is critical to this transformation. You have to be able to share information.
But who says we will not be able to back up the cloud? That we will have to rely on the cloud to exchange truly *huge* amounts of data?
By 2020, $100 should buy you a drive that would hold as much as **14 years** of HD Video. That's very likely to be more content that I will ever own, even should I manage to collect all my home videos and all the home videos of all my relatives and their friends. (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jaDcJXMqSL0/SvtiByNVLFI/AAAAAAAAALQ/oEUZfyV3IY8/s1600-h/FutureStorage.JPG)
The attempts by the telecommunications companies to restrict the internet to low quality videos of kittens, and by the MPAA and RIAA to eliminate content from the internet are doomed. It cannot happen. Even if the internet is destroyed by these forces, kids will pass around hard drives (or whatever tech replaces hard drives) that contain all useful content (indexed and searchable at high quality) by physically handing them off between each other if they have to.
Quad cores could save battery life. The idea is to wake up and sleep cores as they are needed to perform functions. This means that most of the time, 75 percent of the processor could be shut down while idling or just playing music. Then you want to run an app, you wake up as many cores as are needed for the task. The more cores you have, the more you can fit the battery drain to the tasks the phone is being asked to perform.
Furthermore, these phones will increasingly be used as computers. All you need is a virtual desktop, and we can begin doing most of the work we use laptops for today on the phones themselves. And all that will be needed is maybe a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a monitor to plug into the phone (or we will use the led projection built into the phone and a wall) (or we will just remote to a virtual desktop from a desktop or laptop system) (or we will do something else better).
The processing power we will want in a phone will not decrease. The number of sensors we will want in a phone will not decrease. By the end of the evolution of the phone what we will really have is a much smaller, handier Tricorder.
Motorola's "enhancements" to Android make the Atrix nearly unusable. My wife moved from the iPhone to the Atrix, and it is only because Android does allow customization that I was able to download enough skins and fixes to make the phone usable.
AT&T wants to push their useless buggy navigation to the Atrix, despite the fact that Google's navigation works just fine.
All in all, the fresh and clean Android I have on my Nexus One is almost completely corrupted by Motorola and AT&T on the Atrix, and this isn't done because it is in the interest of the customer. This a push of crapware onto the customer serving interests at Motorola and AT&T
Every single smart phone violates patents for which the manufacturer and network has failed to license. This situation will never change either, if you look at the patent thicket involved, and all the lawsuits currently in play.
You want patent reform, then pass a law that no lawmaker can use a product that the lawmaker knows infringes on a patent. This would either result in patent reform, or the removal of all smart phones, tablet computers, laptops, and desktops from Washington D.C. No matter how unlikely the government might be to reform patents, even that is possible if that's what it takes to keep their electronic lifeline to their champaign contributors.
This is a bit misstated. The notice says that the student could be at greater risk of liability if using a wireless router because others might use it to download copyrighted material. In fact, this has been used successfully as a defense, making the statement a lie (the student would actually be less liable if using a wireless router).
None the less, the statement doesn't say using a wireless router is a indicator of copyright infringement.
Google has totally been publicly whipped for Buzz and for collecting WiFi data....
And yet the Telecoms are collecting who-even-has-a-guess-how-much data on our data exchanges, tracking our position, hacking our phones to turn them into ease dropping devices, and whatever else. And we know AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc. are sharing this data freely without warrants with the government.
And our government keeps extending and extending and extending the extraordinary measures of the Patriot Act without providing any evidence that this is needed!
Big Content is pushing to reduce our privacy further, and insists upon technologies aimed at reducing file sharing, while enabling all sorts of fun Actors like Iran to use the same technologies to cut off their population from the rest of the Internet.
Now I am happy that Google is willing to take input on better privacy. And they NEED to be good about privacy, as more and more of our communications are open to them. But they are not alone. There are other companies that need to step up to the privacy needs of their customers.
As the number of accidents approaches zero, the cost of insurance *should* approach zero, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I am with you about ridding myself of the task of driving. But I do fear the consequences of ridding the TSA and Homeland Security of having to pay someone to view and understand video.
Okay, let's just consider this for a bit. Storage costs are dropping like a lead balloon. Chip costs as well.
Soon the idea that people are filming their lives constantly will be a fact rather than a story.
Image processing of said films and audio will allow us to ask our devices where we put our keys, and they will answer (think cheap massive storage meets IBM's Watson).
Our cars will drive themselves (seriously, 40,000 deaths per year because people can't drive well consistently WILL be converted into less than 400 deaths per year because automated cars have limits). First the cars will just kick in when they have to to save our lives, then they will just take over the job. And they will be able to record where we have been, and be able to discuss where we want to go within that historical and geographical context (car meets Watson).
But then things get sinister. The TSA/FBI/CIA/... will be able to record all sorts of things, and ask about what people have been doing. (Video surveillance meets Watson). And there is going to be piles of video for "Surveillance Watson" to think about. Think traffic cameras, hummingbird sized drones, parking lot cameras, etc.
People are going to go into a rage here about the radiation. But what happens when we figure out how to simply understand the changes to the background radiation just because people are walking about? We have all sorts of RF to use, all materials give off a certain amount of radiation, and we are walking through all of it. We have all sorts of sonic sources to process. The bottom line is that passive sensors will *at some point* be able to do what requires active radiation sources today.
Today the limits on processing random data streams limits what government can do with all these sources of information that produce tons and tons of junk for each ounce of "useful-to-three-letter-org" information. The law is increasingly irrelevant when it comes to restraining what these organizations do. What has saved us is that it is just too hard to process that much data.
But at some point it will NOT be too hard to process that much data. We need to make the law RELEVANT in restraining how we are observed, because even if I am wrong about the details I gave above, I am not wrong about the trend. The fact is that technology is going to be increasingly on the side of those that want to know everything about us even if they have no right to gather that information. And we will increasingly see this used to punish those that oppose those in power.
In fact, I developed a rather significant bit of software that I, as an individual, had developed and deployed on a project in Texas, and poof! The rights went to the customer. I redeveloped and deployed the software in Ohio, and poof! The rights went to the customer. The third time, I developed the code and put it in an open sourced project. I then took a W2 job and deployed the OSS version of my tech in NY, PA, and CO for my previous employer. Now for the first time, I am carrying my tech (and all the opportunities to leverage the concepts and tech) along with me to my next job/project.
So no, just because people can access and use what you develop without payment to you DOES NOT mean you can't gain from allowing such access.
As for your claim that this kind of piracy funds "the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills," I have to figure you to be a troll. It is obvious to anyone with a brain and half a minute to think about it that pirated DVDs don't generate any significant funds (as they have to compete with piracy along with the studios) and wouldn't be done by the same people as those in the drug trade in any event. Drug dealers don't sell bootleg shoes either. You want to take money out of the black market, forget about copyright/trademark infringement; there isn't any money there. Instead legalize pot. There's money to be made by drug dealers selling pot illegally.
Our "legal" economy supports wars that have literally killed millions of innocents around the world. But it would be stupid to say we should bomb the movie studios because they also "fund" the same "legal" economy that supports war and other nasty social ills.
Slashdot Mirror
The "Apple Fan Boy" comment was too far on my part.
Clearly the iPhone can be innovative and a market changer without any particular aspect of the device being deserving of a patent, no? If there is a patent on some truly innovative of the iPhone, what is it? Isn't the iPhone truly inventive, even if it does infringe on Samsung's patents?
I am sorry to have offended you, as my biting words were intended for the current system of patents, not at you. Perhaps we are even in agreement.
Are you defending patents, or Apple?
You are claiming that the iPhone was "inventive", while I am claiming that it is, legally, just a collection of mostly obvious tweaks on existing technology. If all you meant was to be an Apple Fan Boy, that the iPhone is a wonderful step up from previous phones, well you are right. My reply had little to do with you.
If you were intending your statement to mean that the iPhone deserves patent protection because of its impact in the market, then my reply certainly addresses that position. My original statement makes the claim that the patents filed in support of the iPhone by Apple, and those infringed upon by Apple, are not really Inventions for the most part. They are, patent by patent, mostly obvious progressions most would make as being experts in the field.
The thing that is truly inventive about the iPhone, its execution and configuration and marketing, this is not really covered by a patent. It may be the true invention, but it hasn't anything to do with the subject at hand, and that is patents for inventions. What Apple did with the iPhone isn't something one can patent anyway, because how can I reduce the value and impact of the iPhone to a set of figures and claims?
This isn't a problem, in my opinion, as regardless of patents, other companies have a hard time replicating what Apple does, even when they have a "patent advantage" to leverage. This is because there is a huge gap between what a patent can cover, and the execution of an idea.
I will be honest, I can't find a citation. But a search of early patents did not yield any examples of patents in the 1700's that covered features of a product as opposed to an identifiable product. It would be very interesting to find the first example of a product covered by multiple patents over multiple features.
But on a common sense note, there isn't any way the framers of the constitution could have anticipated the complexity of modern products like smart phones. The idea that a single product you can hold in your hand could literally have thousands (if not millions) of potentially patentable features couldn't possibly been something they anticipated.
You neatly sidestep the fact that the iPhone, on delivery, infringed on patents owned by Samsung, Motorola, RIM, Palm, IBM, Microsoft, LG, Nokia, and many others.
The original framers of the constitution imagined an invention to be just that, a new device for which a patent could describe and protect. You trot out mini vans and the iPhone as examples of "inventions". However, there isn't any way either of these were ever protected by "A Patent". Because neither were ever considered "AN Invention".
No, unlike what the framers of the constitution could have ever understood, the iPhone incorporates thousands upon thousands of component ideas, many of which are covered by multiple patents owned by literally hundreds of different parties. It isn't "An Invention". It is the embodiment of so many "inventions" from so many sources that it would truly be impossible to define them all.
And let us not forget that Apple never did have the rights to use all the technology in the iPhone, and they still do not have the rights to use the technology in the iPhone.
So (assuming that you think Patents are good) doesn't this mean we have the iPhone *despite* patents? And if that is true, then is it not also true that if we really followed the letter of the law on Patents, we wouldn't even have iPhones today?
So why exactly would you oppose reform where we mostly throw out patents altogether?
In fact, *Nobody* can produce a smart phone without infringing on *Somebody's* patents.
You want IP reform? Take EVERY infringing product off the market. Let's see congress and the Executive branch do without their Blackberries and their iPhones. It is stupid to allow the thousands upon thousands of bogus patents to be used as a patent thicket to protect a few big companies. These are NOT inventions, in the sense viewed by the framers of the constitution. Most are little minor tweaks obvious to anyone working in the industry. But the costs to consumers in more expensive products and less competition and slowed innovation is huge and vast.
It is time we limit tech patents to 3 years. But regardless of the reform, reform is needed.
Alan Turing demonstrated (through what was a thought experiment) the very nature of computation. His contributions stand head and shoulders over any other computational theorist, ever.
Turing machines model computation while striping away all the artifacts required to really build a computer system. At the same time, they demonstrate and prove that there isn't any difference between the results of a computer, and a computer simulating a computer. In one paper he provided us with the model to understand how to build computers, and how to write really fun movies (Matrix, Total Recall, and many others)
A toast to you, Alan! You are loved, and you are missed!
Not a pyramid scheme. Early adopters only have the advantage of position, i.e. they bought early. This is the same with real estate, same with stocks, same with gold, and any other resource that has been generally available but has gone up in value.
The rest of your points have nothing to do with pyramid schemes, even if they are valid complaints.
I would kill to boot Motorola's crap **from** the Atrix.
Dang I wish I could learn to proof read. It is times like these I wonder why Slashdot can't make posts editable....
.5 % of your customers .... with the *biggest* mouths.
Besides, have you not ever used one of Motorola's phones? I got the Atrix and it is *broken* as it ships. Nothing works. My Nexus one? It has its faults, but it works.
I would kill to boot Motorola's crap on the Atrix. Others (even people with no technical skills) can appreciate what it is like to use a phone that *works* verses using a phone that has been purposely (even if not intentionality) broken.
I'd say dedicated devices for video (i.e. T.V. and blueray players). Set top boxes are also somewhat silly and limited. What we really need are small computer systems for entertainment that use gestures and a Minority Report-like UI. All of this needs to be open source, so we don't have to suck on idiotic interfaces and features sets that cow tow to the entertainment industry's idea of a great set of features (i.e. no time shifting, no space shifting, and pay through the nose).
True, I misread the numbers. Apple "only" made 6 billion after taxes in Q2. I wonder where that profit went? From their call:
"Turning to cash. Our cash for short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $65.8 billion at the end of the March quarter compared to $59.7 billion at the end of the December quarter, a sequential increase of $6.1 billion."
http://seekingalpha.com/article/264616-apple-management-discusses-q2-2011-results-earnings-call-transcript
In other words, the profits went into the bank.
So exactly how many jobs are going to be generated by the profits? How much is going to be paid in taxes? My guess.... very very few, and very very little.
This is why we need to tax the Super Rich and tax the Super Rich Corporations. This wealth is going into just a few pockets. Yeah, my 401k is going to get some, and being an Engineer, it is going to be nice compared to most. But the Super Rich (People worth more than 30 million or some such) are going to take a whale of a lot more. And those even richer (say 100 million or more) will get a whale of a lot more than that. I wonder about the billionaires? Yep, there are bigger whales yet!
I have no problem rewarding people for success. And some of that success is the proper management of wealth. But there should be limits. Increasingly, the game is rigged in favor of the rich. And that is demonstrated by companies that make these kinds of profits, and hand their workers (them people working hard for their success) a bone to go bury in the backyard while piling ever increasing funds into investments to insure that their slice is going to be just that much bigger come the next profit announcement.
--We have tried trickle down; Let's give trickle up a shot.
I did a search, and can't seem to find this vital information. I *assume* this is Eastern Standard Time (as Washington D.C. is on the East Coast), but on the other hand, it seemed most of the action occurred on the West Coast (buying us all three more hours).
The Internet is supposed to be only for looking at web pages, no access to actual video or audio content. Want to play a multi-user game? Ha! Not if significant network traffic is required!
250 GB limits on their AT&T U-verse connection (does not apply to your cable subscription). Some have reported upwards of 4000% errors on their data meter (when AT&T's numbers are compared to those collected by DD-WRT routers).
2 GB limits on their data plans for smart phones.
Obviously they already prevent any pre-paid access to the Internet.
I never did hear if they ever disabled the fiber optic splitter they installed so all their traffic went directly to the NSA.
Seriously, these guys are the biggest threats to the Internet yet.
Somewhere around 2015 to 2020, at our current rate of advances over the last 40 years, we can expect to have storage devices that hold Peta-Bytes of storage. (http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/20/petabyte-disks-coming-in-5-years/) That's a 1000 TB drives for the same cost as your TB drive today.
Yes, streaming from the cloud is critical to this transformation. You have to be able to share information.
But who says we will not be able to back up the cloud? That we will have to rely on the cloud to exchange truly *huge* amounts of data?
By 2020, $100 should buy you a drive that would hold as much as **14 years** of HD Video. That's very likely to be more content that I will ever own, even should I manage to collect all my home videos and all the home videos of all my relatives and their friends.
(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jaDcJXMqSL0/SvtiByNVLFI/AAAAAAAAALQ/oEUZfyV3IY8/s1600-h/FutureStorage.JPG)
The attempts by the telecommunications companies to restrict the internet to low quality videos of kittens, and by the MPAA and RIAA to eliminate content from the internet are doomed. It cannot happen. Even if the internet is destroyed by these forces, kids will pass around hard drives (or whatever tech replaces hard drives) that contain all useful content (indexed and searchable at high quality) by physically handing them off between each other if they have to.
Quad cores could save battery life. The idea is to wake up and sleep cores as they are needed to perform functions. This means that most of the time, 75 percent of the processor could be shut down while idling or just playing music. Then you want to run an app, you wake up as many cores as are needed for the task. The more cores you have, the more you can fit the battery drain to the tasks the phone is being asked to perform.
Furthermore, these phones will increasingly be used as computers. All you need is a virtual desktop, and we can begin doing most of the work we use laptops for today on the phones themselves. And all that will be needed is maybe a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a monitor to plug into the phone (or we will use the led projection built into the phone and a wall) (or we will just remote to a virtual desktop from a desktop or laptop system) (or we will do something else better).
The processing power we will want in a phone will not decrease. The number of sensors we will want in a phone will not decrease. By the end of the evolution of the phone what we will really have is a much smaller, handier Tricorder.
Motorola's "enhancements" to Android make the Atrix nearly unusable. My wife moved from the iPhone to the Atrix, and it is only because Android does allow customization that I was able to download enough skins and fixes to make the phone usable.
AT&T wants to push their useless buggy navigation to the Atrix, despite the fact that Google's navigation works just fine.
All in all, the fresh and clean Android I have on my Nexus One is almost completely corrupted by Motorola and AT&T on the Atrix, and this isn't done because it is in the interest of the customer. This a push of crapware onto the customer serving interests at Motorola and AT&T
Every single smart phone violates patents for which the manufacturer and network has failed to license. This situation will never change either, if you look at the patent thicket involved, and all the lawsuits currently in play.
You want patent reform, then pass a law that no lawmaker can use a product that the lawmaker knows infringes on a patent. This would either result in patent reform, or the removal of all smart phones, tablet computers, laptops, and desktops from Washington D.C. No matter how unlikely the government might be to reform patents, even that is possible if that's what it takes to keep their electronic lifeline to their champaign contributors.
This is a bit misstated. The notice says that the student could be at greater risk of liability if using a wireless router because others might use it to download copyrighted material. In fact, this has been used successfully as a defense, making the statement a lie (the student would actually be less liable if using a wireless router).
None the less, the statement doesn't say using a wireless router is a indicator of copyright infringement.
Google has totally been publicly whipped for Buzz and for collecting WiFi data....
And yet the Telecoms are collecting who-even-has-a-guess-how-much data on our data exchanges, tracking our position, hacking our phones to turn them into ease dropping devices, and whatever else. And we know AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc. are sharing this data freely without warrants with the government.
And our government keeps extending and extending and extending the extraordinary measures of the Patriot Act without providing any evidence that this is needed!
Big Content is pushing to reduce our privacy further, and insists upon technologies aimed at reducing file sharing, while enabling all sorts of fun Actors like Iran to use the same technologies to cut off their population from the rest of the Internet.
Now I am happy that Google is willing to take input on better privacy. And they NEED to be good about privacy, as more and more of our communications are open to them. But they are not alone. There are other companies that need to step up to the privacy needs of their customers.
I would encourage everyone to call and register their beef with AT&T. Personally. Over the phone.
The number is 1-800-288-2020.
I think if enough of us call and protest this change, they will back off.
As the number of accidents approaches zero, the cost of insurance *should* approach zero, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I am with you about ridding myself of the task of driving. But I do fear the consequences of ridding the TSA and Homeland Security of having to pay someone to view and understand video.
Okay, let's just consider this for a bit. Storage costs are dropping like a lead balloon. Chip costs as well.
Soon the idea that people are filming their lives constantly will be a fact rather than a story.
Image processing of said films and audio will allow us to ask our devices where we put our keys, and they will answer (think cheap massive storage meets IBM's Watson).
Our cars will drive themselves (seriously, 40,000 deaths per year because people can't drive well consistently WILL be converted into less than 400 deaths per year because automated cars have limits). First the cars will just kick in when they have to to save our lives, then they will just take over the job. And they will be able to record where we have been, and be able to discuss where we want to go within that historical and geographical context (car meets Watson).
But then things get sinister. The TSA/FBI/CIA/... will be able to record all sorts of things, and ask about what people have been doing. (Video surveillance meets Watson). And there is going to be piles of video for "Surveillance Watson" to think about. Think traffic cameras, hummingbird sized drones, parking lot cameras, etc.
People are going to go into a rage here about the radiation. But what happens when we figure out how to simply understand the changes to the background radiation just because people are walking about? We have all sorts of RF to use, all materials give off a certain amount of radiation, and we are walking through all of it. We have all sorts of sonic sources to process. The bottom line is that passive sensors will *at some point* be able to do what requires active radiation sources today.
Today the limits on processing random data streams limits what government can do with all these sources of information that produce tons and tons of junk for each ounce of "useful-to-three-letter-org" information. The law is increasingly irrelevant when it comes to restraining what these organizations do. What has saved us is that it is just too hard to process that much data.
But at some point it will NOT be too hard to process that much data. We need to make the law RELEVANT in restraining how we are observed, because even if I am wrong about the details I gave above, I am not wrong about the trend. The fact is that technology is going to be increasingly on the side of those that want to know everything about us even if they have no right to gather that information. And we will increasingly see this used to punish those that oppose those in power.
Just as a note, piracy doesn't == payment.
In fact, I developed a rather significant bit of software that I, as an individual, had developed and deployed on a project in Texas, and poof! The rights went to the customer. I redeveloped and deployed the software in Ohio, and poof! The rights went to the customer. The third time, I developed the code and put it in an open sourced project. I then took a W2 job and deployed the OSS version of my tech in NY, PA, and CO for my previous employer. Now for the first time, I am carrying my tech (and all the opportunities to leverage the concepts and tech) along with me to my next job/project.
So no, just because people can access and use what you develop without payment to you DOES NOT mean you can't gain from allowing such access.
As for your claim that this kind of piracy funds "the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills," I have to figure you to be a troll. It is obvious to anyone with a brain and half a minute to think about it that pirated DVDs don't generate any significant funds (as they have to compete with piracy along with the studios) and wouldn't be done by the same people as those in the drug trade in any event. Drug dealers don't sell bootleg shoes either. You want to take money out of the black market, forget about copyright/trademark infringement; there isn't any money there. Instead legalize pot. There's money to be made by drug dealers selling pot illegally.
Our "legal" economy supports wars that have literally killed millions of innocents around the world. But it would be stupid to say we should bomb the movie studios because they also "fund" the same "legal" economy that supports war and other nasty social ills.
The first two episodes you mention are shocking, but where are the rest? ...
Oh, and exactly how many is a "Brazilian" anyway?