Try reading his comment again. The connection between "changing the usability and UI one comes to expect from a web-browser" and XPI is exactly what has broken IE ever since Microsoft tried this (as the GP pointed out). When you blur the boundaries between a trusted environment and an untrusted environment, you break the very rudimentary security that the web-browser has. The main outcry in the comments here today is not even about the assumption that FF4.0 would be "bloated" - it's because it'll become the same insecure mess that IE is.
A real desktop application is trusted. I installed it. I gave it access to my local drive. It is fundamentally different to some webapp running in a page that I happened to surf across.
My browser profile is private. If it's going to "float" between browsers then how is privacy going to be guaranteed?
Most people don't want a tightly integrated experience - because the security problems that it would cause are too much hassle for them. They want a browser that works - it browses the web (including whatever scripting, and media that requires) - but it works within a sandbox, away from the rest of their system.
As people are recommending their hosting providers this seems like a good place to ask for a suggestion. I've wanted to move my filesystem off of the machine at my place, and onto an online provider. Unlike most people looking for shell account I'm not so interested in bandwidth costs, I figure I'll only need 200GB/mon. But for storage I want about 2TB, and this seems to be the killer. Each hosting company that I've checked has built their pricing plans around the assumption that people are hosting web-apps - lots of bandwidth, not very much disk.
What's the most cost effective way to do this? S3 looks ideal, but it is rather pricey. Dedicated hosting seems a waste as all I want is access to the storage and it's going to cost about £100/month to get 2TB of storage.
Of course it is. Taking up too many resources on a multiuser system is a technological problem, one that is solved with disk quotas and per-user cpu utilization limits. Taking up too many resources on a network is likewise a technological problem, one that should be addressed with intelligent bandwidth accounting that allows for bursts and does not mislead users as to their permitted allotment.
You've used the same phrase twice, but it has very different meanings in those contexts. The issue of what is too much bandwidth for a user is, as I stated, a political problem. ISPs are mis-selling their connections, and misleading their customers about how they can be used. Once the political problem of what is being sold is addressed, then it is a technological problem to enforce those limits.
The rest of your post seems redundant. You've repeated what I suggested.
We both agree about how parallelism impacts jobs in the real world. We also agree that if we can speed a job up then we don't care how it is achieved. The point that I made that you keep skipping over is that when there is no fine-grained parallelism available the key question becomes do I care about speeding up multiple copies of a job, or do I need a single job to run faster.
The OP's choice of compilation was odd, which is what I remarked on. If I'm compiling lots of things in one project then it will go faster. But compilation itself is not easy to parallelise, and as I pointed out commercial compilers don't currently speed up single compilation units over multiple cores.
Your false dichotomy is that a single unit must be simple (hello world) and anything more complex can be split into multiple units. Not only is this not true - but I gave a concrete example right at the beginning of where this would be a problem. This would be the point that has whistled over your head on multiple occasions.
When the compiler needs to perform global analysis (ie if you are doing aggressive global optimisations across the whole program - not local optimisations within a single unit) there is no obvious way to speed it up. There may well be fine-grained parallelism in there but nobody has exploited it yet. There is no coarse-grain parallelism because you only have a single task - compile the whole program.
Applying these sort of aggressive global optimisations has been the focus of the compiler community for decades. Now that multicores are becoming common it will be another interesting problem to parallelise.
Wow, you totally missed the point of what I was saying didn't you. Fine-grained / coarse grained does matter in real life.
If a problem doesn't exhibit fine-grained parallelism then running multiple copies is the *best* you can do. In some situations that is enough (i.e. a large project with lots of separate compilation units). In some situations it isn't enough, i.e. where you can't split your compilation into separate units because you're trying to run global optimisations across the whole lot.
a) He is trying to sell his book b) He is trying to sell his book
and, not to forget
c) He is trying to sell his book.
At no point does it occur to him that sales of his entry-level guide to multi-threading is selling better amongst less experienced programmers... because the older programmers with experience do this shit for their bread and butter.
I wouldn't take it too seriously. He is a well-known crank who has been hawking that shit for years. Like all nutjobs he has taken a tiny grain of truth and the built an entire castle of delusion on-top of it. His ideas of signal based computing are vapour, but the best aspects of them have been well explored within academia as process calculi. The type of local semantics that he describes are useful for safety properties (and are used extensively in formal verification) but translating them into an efficient form of executable is very difficult.
What do you mean by "parallelize well"? Normally people would use that phrase to imply fine-grained parallelism in the problem but I suspect that you are using it differently. For example when you say that compilation parallelizes well are you talking about coarse-grain parallelism across compilation-units? This is not really a single instance of a problem being computed in parallel, but rather many independent instances of a problem. If you are willing to use many independent instances of a problem then the coarse-grain parallelism will always scale "well" - i.e linearly in the number of cores. But this does not provide a speedup in many real-world applications.
In your compilation example, it is easy to get speedups at the compilation level using something like make -jN. But this assumes that each unit is independent. If you want to apply advanced global optimisations then this is not always the case, and then you hit the harder problem of parallelizing the compilation algorithms rather than just running multiple instances. It's not impossible but I'm not aware of any commercial compilers that do this.
Given that the AC was polite and pointed out that the warning was helpful for some who haven't come across that type of url before: did you take lessons in being an arrogant dickwad, or does it come naturally?
No, you should read more carefull. I said that 10Mb was slow for the next generation of sevices currently being unveiled - i.e. ADSL2 which is undergoing trails at various locations. I am well aware what current speeds are like as I have a 4Mb connection despite living within 0.5mile of our exchange. Although we had 8Mb at our previous address I asked for a downgrade to 2Mb because of the line dropping problems. I take it that you are aware that 10Mb is available to most urban areas through cable?
I don't believe you that OFCOM limit contention to 40:1. Can you provide some backup? I suspect not as one of Plusnet's products is sold with a 50:1 contention ratio suggesting that you are talking out of your arse. Given that most ISPs have FUPs of around 40-50GB a month this suggests that contention to the backbone is currently 35-40:1 for most people.
At 100:1 a connection would be fine for browsing - that is the entire point of BT products sold with a 3GB monthly cap. The only thing that would stop it being suitable (given that the bandwidth would be there) is latency. But that is a separate issue and it does not have a direct relationship with the contention ratio.
So you don't like it. That doesn't make it a bad idea, your alternative is a hard cap instead of a metred rate when you exceed your normal usage. While you would prefer that I would think it was a terrible idea as I would rather pay more than lose access in that situation.
So I take it that you are willing to pay access rates from 5 years ago? Because without those high-volume users to drive up demand and bring down prices you'd still be paying 2x or 3x what you do now. How does that suit you for fair?
Nice, you made me smile. I saw his earlier article on ZDnet when I clicked through his history to establish how fucked in the head he was. He came high on the scale. The basic problem with his rant about metered access is that it's complete bollocks. A metered plan doesn't mean that you have an allowance of 0 bytes a month, with a per-byte cost. Instead it can be a basic allowance with a price to exceed that. This is how all mobile phone contracts in the UK work to price the access resource. We also have the metered without an allowance kind which are sold as Pay-as-you-go.
Well said. The basic dishonesty in the argument is that p2p is used a boogie-man to allow filtering of traffic (which should be protocol filtering) by those who actually want to differentiate in pricing for source/destination. It needs to be said loudly and repeatedly that the two are both separate issues.
Even if that is true, the congestion won't be correlated between between your streams, if it occurred on the final hops (and hence different final networks). There is a more basic problem than the lack of correlation between congestion on separate streams - the ZDnet editor, and the author of the proposal have no grasp of reality.
Here's an alternative (but equally effective) way of reducing congestion - ask p2p users to download less. Because that is what this proposal amounts to. A voluntary measure to hammer your own bandwidth for the greater good of the network will not succeed. The idea that applications should have "fair" slices of the available bandwidth is ludicrous. What is fair about squeezing email and p2p into the same bandwidth profile?
This seems to be a highly political issue in the US. Every ISP that I've used in the UK has used the same approach - traffic shaping using QoS on the routers. Web, Email, VoIP and almost everything else are "high priority". p2p is low priority. This doesn't break p2p connections, or reset them in the way that Verizon has done. But it means that streams belonging to p2p traffic will back off more because there is a higher rate of failure. It "solves" the problem without a crappy user-applied bandaid.
It doesn't stop the problem that people will use as much bandwidth for p2p apps as they can get away with. This is not a technological problem and there will never be a technological solution. The article has an implicit bias when it talks about users "exploiting congestion control" and "hogging network resources". Well duh! That's why they have have network connections in the first place. Why is the assumption that a good network is an empty network?
All ISPs should be forced to sell their connections based on target utilisations. Ie here is a 10Mb/s connection, at 100:1 contention, we expect you to use 0.1Mb/s on average, or 240GB a month. If you are below that then fine, if you go above it then you get hit with per/GB charges. The final point is the numbers, 10Mb/s is slow for the next-gen connections now being sold (24Mb/s in the UK in some areas), and 100:1 is a large contention ratio. So why shouldn't someone use 240GB of traffic on that connection every month?
You've missed some of the puzzle. It is not entirely about what a webmaster wants. It is about what Google wants, and also what the websurfer wants. In this case the "new feature" being touted is simply the old site: keyword with a new interface. When the surfer decides to hunt for information on one particular domain - it is not about what the webmaster wants, it is about what all three parties want.
The reason that it seems so black and white is that the complaints here are from greedy bastards trying to increase their slice of the pie. If a user a clicks on the ad from a competitor within a site search then guess what - the competitor looked more interesting. By censoring these ads the customer would lose out, and Google would lose out on revenue. Allowing the webmaster to restrict the set of ads shown on searches of their site would make it less black and white, but even doing this "a little" would damage the interests of the other two parties.
These claims are from the "luddite" segment of the web - who thought that deep linking somehow breached their copyright. If you want to compete on the web then provide good content and watch the traffic come to you. If these people think that they have trouble no then just wait for the first generation of decent semantic web tools (current rates of progress, what 10yrs?). Walled gardens won't work anymore. Trying to drown the competition won't work anymore. Trying to support pisspoor content on 15pages with one hundred ads per page wont work, and crying that free access to the information breaks your business model won't make it change.
Perhaps you would? You've post a link to wikipedia as an appeal to authority but you've misquoted the page and butchered your definition of NP-c. The only reason that you were modded insightful is that the average slashdotter with modpoints doesn't understand the difference.
It's not hard to follow; if I give you a candidate solution to a problem and you can check quickly if it is true or not (i.e. in poly-time) then the problem lies in NP. So all problems in P lie within NP. Some problems in NP are harder than others i.e. 3-sat. If any single one of those problems can be reduced to the problem being discussed (in poly-time) then then it is complete within NP - it is one of the hardest problems in NP.
The poster than you were replying to was pointing out (in terms that you didn't understand, I suggest you read his reply closely) to you that the difficulty of factoring is not related to the difficulty of NPc problems. He is entirely correct, not only is there no theoretical basis for relating the hardness of the problem but if you have spent any time working on NPc problems, and on factoring you would understand that they are very different.
Finally, quantum computers cannot (currently) factor large integers. It is silly for you to make that claim in a discussion about whether or not QC would ever scale to large problems at all. Also the integers that they can factor are not a direct result of their non-determinism. Don't forget that we can run non-deterministic algorithms on devices other than QCs.
Sigh. Your point does not remain valid. You argued that prior art was trivial because Nakamura invented the processs before her. You also argued that five minutes on wikipedia would back this up. I have not provided prior art, I provided a link that refutes your prior art claim.
I can't find the new story that claimed that the 1990 patent was one in the case - but other than the claim in the article (which isn't backed up anywhere on the web) there is no evidence that the suit is based on the 1993 patent. What is more likely is that the suit is based on both, as this is how she got a settlement in the last round of suits. The point being that she has not patented blue lasers, nor has she claimed that she has. As the other reply notes she has patented the manufacturing process that would be needed to produce the lasers cheaply enough for consumer electronics.
It is natural to assume that everyone with a patent is a troll after most of the crappy stories that make to slashdot. But in this case we have a scientist who did some commercially valuable work. Then patented it. Then notified the infringing companies straight away when they started to use it (back in 1995), and who has fought through the courts to stop these large corporations from walking all over her.
This is how the patent system should work, and your original claim that the FTC should have dismissed the patent after five minutes on wikipedia is as asinine as ever.
This would be a complete non-problem. If you could inject a malicious script then you could replace the original rather than a script downloaded on demand. It's not secure against a man-in-the-middle because downloading and running non-authenticated scripts off the web is not secure anyway. Given that you could hijack the original script, why try and hijack one of the sub-units?
When you made your indepth investigation of dates on wikipedia, why did you only look at one side? It's nice that that Nakamura claims invention of the blue LED (not what Neuman is suing over btw) in 1991. But the patent that she is suing over is for a particular type of doping that is useful to create these LEDs - which she filed in 1988.
Try and get your basic facts rights before you post your pathetic righteous indignation that the FTC doesn't just conduct its business on wikipedia.
It seems to be a problem with the gere. When you are talking about post-singularity civilisations it is hard to come up with a satisfying conclusion. The Cyber Flower is another example of a crass Hamilton ending, very disappointing after the amazing story he had built up for the first 90% of the book. Contrary to what some posters are claiming in the thread above Excession was one of Bank's best Culture novels because of the way he wraps up the ending.
Slashdot Mirror
Try reading his comment again. The connection between "changing the usability and UI one comes to expect from a web-browser" and XPI is exactly what has broken IE ever since Microsoft tried this (as the GP pointed out). When you blur the boundaries between a trusted environment and an untrusted environment, you break the very rudimentary security that the web-browser has. The main outcry in the comments here today is not even about the assumption that FF4.0 would be "bloated" - it's because it'll become the same insecure mess that IE is.
A real desktop application is trusted. I installed it. I gave it access to my local drive. It is fundamentally different to some webapp running in a page that I happened to surf across.
My browser profile is private. If it's going to "float" between browsers then how is privacy going to be guaranteed?
Most people don't want a tightly integrated experience - because the security problems that it would cause are too much hassle for them. They want a browser that works - it browses the web (including whatever scripting, and media that requires) - but it works within a sandbox, away from the rest of their system.
As people are recommending their hosting providers this seems like a good place to ask for a suggestion. I've wanted to move my filesystem off of the machine at my place, and onto an online provider. Unlike most people looking for shell account I'm not so interested in bandwidth costs, I figure I'll only need 200GB/mon. But for storage I want about 2TB, and this seems to be the killer. Each hosting company that I've checked has built their pricing plans around the assumption that people are hosting web-apps - lots of bandwidth, not very much disk.
What's the most cost effective way to do this? S3 looks ideal, but it is rather pricey. Dedicated hosting seems a waste as all I want is access to the storage and it's going to cost about £100/month to get 2TB of storage.
Has anyone got any ideas / experience?
You've used the same phrase twice, but it has very different meanings in those contexts. The issue of what is too much bandwidth for a user is, as I stated, a political problem. ISPs are mis-selling their connections, and misleading their customers about how they can be used. Once the political problem of what is being sold is addressed, then it is a technological problem to enforce those limits.
The rest of your post seems redundant. You've repeated what I suggested.
Did you realise that your entire post was contained in the GP's comment about distcc?
I'm fairly sure that you have missed the point.
We both agree about how parallelism impacts jobs in the real world. We also agree that if we can speed a job up then we don't care how it is achieved. The point that I made that you keep skipping over is that when there is no fine-grained parallelism available the key question becomes do I care about speeding up multiple copies of a job, or do I need a single job to run faster.
The OP's choice of compilation was odd, which is what I remarked on. If I'm compiling lots of things in one project then it will go faster. But compilation itself is not easy to parallelise, and as I pointed out commercial compilers don't currently speed up single compilation units over multiple cores.
Your false dichotomy is that a single unit must be simple (hello world) and anything more complex can be split into multiple units. Not only is this not true - but I gave a concrete example right at the beginning of where this would be a problem. This would be the point that has whistled over your head on multiple occasions.
When the compiler needs to perform global analysis (ie if you are doing aggressive global optimisations across the whole program - not local optimisations within a single unit) there is no obvious way to speed it up. There may well be fine-grained parallelism in there but nobody has exploited it yet. There is no coarse-grain parallelism because you only have a single task - compile the whole program.
Applying these sort of aggressive global optimisations has been the focus of the compiler community for decades. Now that multicores are becoming common it will be another interesting problem to parallelise.
Wow, you totally missed the point of what I was saying didn't you. Fine-grained / coarse grained does matter in real life.
If a problem doesn't exhibit fine-grained parallelism then running multiple copies is the *best* you can do. In some situations that is enough (i.e. a large project with lots of separate compilation units). In some situations it isn't enough, i.e. where you can't split your compilation into separate units because you're trying to run global optimisations across the whole lot.
Further to your point:
... because the older programmers with experience do this shit for their bread and butter.
a) He is trying to sell his book
b) He is trying to sell his book
and, not to forget
c) He is trying to sell his book.
At no point does it occur to him that sales of his entry-level guide to multi-threading is selling better amongst less experienced programmers
As you said, Nothing to see here, move along.
I wouldn't take it too seriously. He is a well-known crank who has been hawking that shit for years. Like all nutjobs he has taken a tiny grain of truth and the built an entire castle of delusion on-top of it. His ideas of signal based computing are vapour, but the best aspects of them have been well explored within academia as process calculi. The type of local semantics that he describes are useful for safety properties (and are used extensively in formal verification) but translating them into an efficient form of executable is very difficult.
What do you mean by "parallelize well"? Normally people would use that phrase to imply fine-grained parallelism in the problem but I suspect that you are using it differently. For example when you say that compilation parallelizes well are you talking about coarse-grain parallelism across compilation-units? This is not really a single instance of a problem being computed in parallel, but rather many independent instances of a problem. If you are willing to use many independent instances of a problem then the coarse-grain parallelism will always scale "well" - i.e linearly in the number of cores. But this does not provide a speedup in many real-world applications.
In your compilation example, it is easy to get speedups at the compilation level using something like make -jN. But this assumes that each unit is independent. If you want to apply advanced global optimisations then this is not always the case, and then you hit the harder problem of parallelizing the compilation algorithms rather than just running multiple instances. It's not impossible but I'm not aware of any commercial compilers that do this.
Given that the AC was polite and pointed out that the warning was helpful for some who haven't come across that type of url before: did you take lessons in being an arrogant dickwad, or does it come naturally?
No, you should read more carefull. I said that 10Mb was slow for the next generation of sevices currently being unveiled - i.e. ADSL2 which is undergoing trails at various locations. I am well aware what current speeds are like as I have a 4Mb connection despite living within 0.5mile of our exchange. Although we had 8Mb at our previous address I asked for a downgrade to 2Mb because of the line dropping problems. I take it that you are aware that 10Mb is available to most urban areas through cable?
I don't believe you that OFCOM limit contention to 40:1. Can you provide some backup? I suspect not as one of Plusnet's products is sold with a 50:1 contention ratio suggesting that you are talking out of your arse. Given that most ISPs have FUPs of around 40-50GB a month this suggests that contention to the backbone is currently 35-40:1 for most people.
At 100:1 a connection would be fine for browsing - that is the entire point of BT products sold with a 3GB monthly cap. The only thing that would stop it being suitable (given that the bandwidth would be there) is latency. But that is a separate issue and it does not have a direct relationship with the contention ratio.
So you don't like it. That doesn't make it a bad idea, your alternative is a hard cap instead of a metred rate when you exceed your normal usage. While you would prefer that I would think it was a terrible idea as I would rather pay more than lose access in that situation.
So I take it that you are willing to pay access rates from 5 years ago? Because without those high-volume users to drive up demand and bring down prices you'd still be paying 2x or 3x what you do now. How does that suit you for fair?
Nice, you made me smile. I saw his earlier article on ZDnet when I clicked through his history to establish how fucked in the head he was. He came high on the scale. The basic problem with his rant about metered access is that it's complete bollocks. A metered plan doesn't mean that you have an allowance of 0 bytes a month, with a per-byte cost. Instead it can be a basic allowance with a price to exceed that. This is how all mobile phone contracts in the UK work to price the access resource. We also have the metered without an allowance kind which are sold as Pay-as-you-go.
Well said. The basic dishonesty in the argument is that p2p is used a boogie-man to allow filtering of traffic (which should be protocol filtering) by those who actually want to differentiate in pricing for source/destination. It needs to be said loudly and repeatedly that the two are both separate issues.
Even if that is true, the congestion won't be correlated between between your streams, if it occurred on the final hops (and hence different final networks). There is a more basic problem than the lack of correlation between congestion on separate streams - the ZDnet editor, and the author of the proposal have no grasp of reality.
Here's an alternative (but equally effective) way of reducing congestion - ask p2p users to download less. Because that is what this proposal amounts to. A voluntary measure to hammer your own bandwidth for the greater good of the network will not succeed. The idea that applications should have "fair" slices of the available bandwidth is ludicrous. What is fair about squeezing email and p2p into the same bandwidth profile?
This seems to be a highly political issue in the US. Every ISP that I've used in the UK has used the same approach - traffic shaping using QoS on the routers. Web, Email, VoIP and almost everything else are "high priority". p2p is low priority. This doesn't break p2p connections, or reset them in the way that Verizon has done. But it means that streams belonging to p2p traffic will back off more because there is a higher rate of failure. It "solves" the problem without a crappy user-applied bandaid.
It doesn't stop the problem that people will use as much bandwidth for p2p apps as they can get away with. This is not a technological problem and there will never be a technological solution. The article has an implicit bias when it talks about users "exploiting congestion control" and "hogging network resources". Well duh! That's why they have have network connections in the first place. Why is the assumption that a good network is an empty network?
All ISPs should be forced to sell their connections based on target utilisations. Ie here is a 10Mb/s connection, at 100:1 contention, we expect you to use 0.1Mb/s on average, or 240GB a month. If you are below that then fine, if you go above it then you get hit with per/GB charges. The final point is the numbers, 10Mb/s is slow for the next-gen connections now being sold (24Mb/s in the UK in some areas), and 100:1 is a large contention ratio. So why shouldn't someone use 240GB of traffic on that connection every month?
You've missed some of the puzzle. It is not entirely about what a webmaster wants. It is about what Google wants, and also what the websurfer wants. In this case the "new feature" being touted is simply the old site: keyword with a new interface. When the surfer decides to hunt for information on one particular domain - it is not about what the webmaster wants, it is about what all three parties want.
The reason that it seems so black and white is that the complaints here are from greedy bastards trying to increase their slice of the pie. If a user a clicks on the ad from a competitor within a site search then guess what - the competitor looked more interesting. By censoring these ads the customer would lose out, and Google would lose out on revenue. Allowing the webmaster to restrict the set of ads shown on searches of their site would make it less black and white, but even doing this "a little" would damage the interests of the other two parties.
These claims are from the "luddite" segment of the web - who thought that deep linking somehow breached their copyright. If you want to compete on the web then provide good content and watch the traffic come to you. If these people think that they have trouble no then just wait for the first generation of decent semantic web tools (current rates of progress, what 10yrs?). Walled gardens won't work anymore. Trying to drown the competition won't work anymore. Trying to support pisspoor content on 15pages with one hundred ads per page wont work, and crying that free access to the information breaks your business model won't make it change.
Exactly! Think of the children. But, err, no not like that. Hmm, bad context maybe...
Perhaps you would? You've post a link to wikipedia as an appeal to authority but you've misquoted the page and butchered your definition of NP-c. The only reason that you were modded insightful is that the average slashdotter with modpoints doesn't understand the difference.
It's not hard to follow; if I give you a candidate solution to a problem and you can check quickly if it is true or not (i.e. in poly-time) then the problem lies in NP. So all problems in P lie within NP. Some problems in NP are harder than others i.e. 3-sat. If any single one of those problems can be reduced to the problem being discussed (in poly-time) then then it is complete within NP - it is one of the hardest problems in NP.
The poster than you were replying to was pointing out (in terms that you didn't understand, I suggest you read his reply closely) to you that the difficulty of factoring is not related to the difficulty of NPc problems. He is entirely correct, not only is there no theoretical basis for relating the hardness of the problem but if you have spent any time working on NPc problems, and on factoring you would understand that they are very different.
Finally, quantum computers cannot (currently) factor large integers. It is silly for you to make that claim in a discussion about whether or not QC would ever scale to large problems at all. Also the integers that they can factor are not a direct result of their non-determinism. Don't forget that we can run non-deterministic algorithms on devices other than QCs.
Happy days. Check the rest of the thread. Thank you for shopping at the make-a-wish foundation...
Sigh. Your point does not remain valid. You argued that prior art was trivial because Nakamura invented the processs before her. You also argued that five minutes on wikipedia would back this up. I have not provided prior art, I provided a link that refutes your prior art claim.
I can't find the new story that claimed that the 1990 patent was one in the case - but other than the claim in the article (which isn't backed up anywhere on the web) there is no evidence that the suit is based on the 1993 patent. What is more likely is that the suit is based on both, as this is how she got a settlement in the last round of suits. The point being that she has not patented blue lasers, nor has she claimed that she has. As the other reply notes she has patented the manufacturing process that would be needed to produce the lasers cheaply enough for consumer electronics.
It is natural to assume that everyone with a patent is a troll after most of the crappy stories that make to slashdot. But in this case we have a scientist who did some commercially valuable work. Then patented it. Then notified the infringing companies straight away when they started to use it (back in 1995), and who has fought through the courts to stop these large corporations from walking all over her.
This is how the patent system should work, and your original claim that the FTC should have dismissed the patent after five minutes on wikipedia is as asinine as ever.
This would be a complete non-problem. If you could inject a malicious script then you could replace the original rather than a script downloaded on demand. It's not secure against a man-in-the-middle because downloading and running non-authenticated scripts off the web is not secure anyway. Given that you could hijack the original script, why try and hijack one of the sub-units?
When you made your indepth investigation of dates on wikipedia, why did you only look at one side? It's nice that that Nakamura claims invention of the blue LED (not what Neuman is suing over btw) in 1991. But the patent that she is suing over is for a particular type of doping that is useful to create these LEDs - which she filed in 1988.
Try and get your basic facts rights before you post your pathetic righteous indignation that the FTC doesn't just conduct its business on wikipedia.
That was the least successful troll that I've ever seen.
You fail.
It seems to be a problem with the gere. When you are talking about post-singularity civilisations it is hard to come up with a satisfying conclusion. The Cyber Flower is another example of a crass Hamilton ending, very disappointing after the amazing story he had built up for the first 90% of the book. Contrary to what some posters are claiming in the thread above Excession was one of Bank's best Culture novels because of the way he wraps up the ending.