I, and the article were talking about locking the phones functionality e.g. not being allowed to use bluetooth to synch with your computers address book and therefore being forced instead to use an expensive alternative service provided by the telco.
I know the sim card on phones is locked but in most cases you can have it unlocked by cancelling your contract and paying some cash to the provider. You can also probably unlock the sim yourself or find someone to do it for you.
I've no problem with SIM locks, if you're getting a phone for "free" it's fair enough the provider wants to make sure they get they money back by you using the service.
What I don't think is fair is the standard functionality of your phone being crippled in order to force you to pay out more in unexpected costs, I've never seen this in the UK ( which is probably because anyone trying it would find all their potential new customers migrating elsewhere ) and I'm glad that it's being addressed in the US.
I think the mobile phone industry can take off just fine without locked down handsets.
I live in Europe and I have never seen or heard of anyone who has their phones functionality locked down. Most people don't buy phones here, they get them for "free" when they sign up to a years contract. At the end of the year you get an upgrade to a new handset and can keep the old one and do what you like with it including using it on other networks.
"perhaps one day we can find new evidence that will reconcile both theories"
In fact we already have, it's been discovered that the bible is just some book written around 1700 years ago and has absolutely nothing to say about the origin of life, or any other scientific matters. As such it contains no theories and you can now discard it as anything but a fanciful fairytale.
As other people have mentioned you have to have a driving licence, insurance, MOT in order to drive on the road but you do not have to have the documentation on you at all times. In most cases you will be asked to produce the relevant documents at a police station within 7 days if you're stopped.
The problem the government says this system is addressing is that sometimes people lie about their identity and try to pretend they are someone else so there is no come back when they don't turn up at the station with their documents ( most likely 'cos they never bothered getting them ).
I see some problems with this however, firstly the only database of fingerprints they have to test against are those of known criminals who have been arrested at some point for something else. It's probably fair to say that people driving around without insurance or a driving licence are more likely to have criminal records than people who are driving legally but I bet that its going to be a fairly low percentage of people who are stopped and don't have the correct documentation are actually going to be matched in their fingerprint database. This obviously is going to make no difference whatsoever for the majority of people the police stop and whos identity they need to verify.
The two ways you could make this system work are either by embarking on a wholesale fingerprint collection drive with the aim of fingerprinted the entire population so that you would always get a match in the database or by requiring fingerprints to get a driving licence and checking against that database.
In order to get a set of fingerprints for each driving licence you'd need to persuade current licence holders to take the time out to go to the police station or a suitable location to be fingerprinted which isn't going to go down at all well and would be a more or less suicidal policy for any government to suggest.
The government has already made up a law to require anyone who is arrested to be fingerprinted whether or not they actually guilty of anything so it would seem they are aiming for the stealthy approach to gather all our fingerprints without us noticing.
At present they aren't legally allowed to demand fingerprints from drivers which is why in this trial they say they are not keeping the prints and you can opt out of providing them. You can bet that once they have forced the relevant laws through it will become an offense not to provide your prints when asked by a traffic cop and that they will be held on record forever. If this isn't the aim then this system is a total waste of everyones time and money.
Muppet, aren't cedars the sort of trees which whip about in the wind ? He's describing a big cow or something swishing its tail to disperse the flies. If not a cow there probably around 1 million other more likely possibilities to consider before you can conclude it's a dinosaur.
Holy shit, rather than replying to your e-mail they realised you were posting on/. and decided it would be quicker to answer your query there. That is scary.
So it's OK to catch a hit and run driver if he is spotted and his number plate rememembered by a member of the public but it's not OK if his number is recognised by a camera system ?
The threat from the IRA seemed far worse and more likely to affect me than this current perceived threat from Al Quaeda or whoever. E.g. the IRA has actually blown up a lot pubs in my city which is something the latest terrorists have yet to achieve.
So far as I recall the measures taken against that were signs in swimming baths telling you to watch for suspicious packages and the absence of bins in stations everywhere so it's hard to see how the current ridiculous measures are justified.
Essentially I simply don't believe the goverment any more or whoever it is they trot out to tell us we should still be scared, maybe they are telling the truth this time or maybe they are simply trying to drum up support for their latest legislation e.g. ID cards. I think they still have to explain why they were putting tanks outside Heathrow when they were trying to convince us Iraq was a dangerous enough threat we should invade them.
A prominent police spokesman says that police are given the following directives before dealing with these kind of situations
If you're ever asked why you're doing what you doing simply repeat "Just following orders"
If you're asked what you're doing in a particular situation ( beating up protestors ) say "I am working to protect the interests of my corporate paymasters McDonalds & Starbucks"
You are making a mistake when you say that the cops could either stand there repeatedly tazering the guy or just leave and and do nothing. They had other options and in this case they should have used them.
Firstly the guy should have left when he was asked to and not made such a fuss, if I met him I'd probably think he was a prick and would enjoy smashing his face in.
However the problem is that the cops completely failed to handle the situation and ended up simply abusing the right they have to carry tasers. Either they haven't had any law enforcement training or they are just really really stupid I don't know but there were 5 of them and they were dealing with 1 kid who wasn't behaving violently and wasn't drunk or anything like that.
I have seen 2 female and 1 male ( British ) police offices take out a huge 6'6" bloke was plastered and trying to kill them all, if they can do that then there is no reason why 5 competant officers should have any trouble with this guy. They have the cuffs on him, he's just lying there all they need to do is either leave him to cool down for a bit of between the 5 of them pick him up and carry him out the van.
Their behaviour on that video is indefensible, repeatedly tasering the guy obviously wasn't getting them anywhere, it didn't get them anywhere and seemed to me more like the cops just wanted to take out a bit of anger on the guy. Also they shouldn't threaten to start tasering the crowd around them for asking for their badge number.
"Now when we finally get a sustainable fusion reaction that produces more energy that it uses, that would be something to write about!"
I agree and I think the more 17 year olds we have building stuff like this the closer we will come to realising that goal. Who knows maybe one of them will make a mistake and discover something unexpectedly useful, the less people you have experimenting the less likely you'll discover anything new.
I live in Birmingham and worked for a company once which had taken on a contract from Birmingham City Council to digitise their land records. I think the Council had been working on it for a few years without getting anywhere before they handed it over to the company I was working for. The whole thing was a total disaster, by the time I left it was already over 6 years late which was partly the company I was working fors fault for not anticipating the uselessness of the council in organising their end of things and partly the councils for being totally incompetent at doing any of the things they said they would do in order to allow us to do anything and not managing us, as their contractors, very well at all.
Unless things have changed in the council over the last 10 years I would imagine they are just as incompetent at anything they turn there hand to. I think it was only last week that we heard the manager of the streetlighting division had recieved over £70,000 for a years work where he had in fact been off sick for the entire year. This wouldn't be so bad if hadn't also managed to pick up another few tens of thousands of pounds for overtime, when he is off work sick. The council said we shouldn't make a fuss about this since the stress it might put the man under would only mean he would be off work for longer.
Come to think about one of the councils employees who used to liase with us spent a good 4 months off sick and then went on a month holiday which she later claimed back and took again because she said she had been sick during the first one and so it wasn't a proper holiday.
I really don't think it works like that, anoles with shorter legs are better at climbing trees but they don't start developing shorter legs in order to climb trees. Instead because they are climbing trees this leads to an advantage ( not being eaten ) over their cousins who are not so good at climbing trees.
What you seem to be suggesting is that the anoles thought to themselves, "Hmm, we'd be better off with shorter legs, lets make our kids have shorter legs".
I suspect they are largely arguing how to how the mechanics of evolution work rather than suggesting entirely seperate theories which take nothing from evolution at all. This is exactly the same as any scientific work so if you're saying that evolution is controversial then you must also be saying that all scientific theories are controversial.
I would say that we expect their to be disagreement about scientific theories and this is in fact the default position to take so for a scientfic theory of any kind to be described as controversial it needs to have the majority of those involved putting forward good arguments as to why the whole thing should be changed. I don't think evolution is in that situation and therefore I still don't think it can be described as controversial.
I'm not sure I agree with you about the possibility of any controvesy here. I, obviously, haven't read the article so I'm just responding to your comments here.
Firstly Evolution is not always controversial, a massively insignificant minority occasionally try to cast aspersions upon it but this doesn't make it controversial.
Secondly I don't see the choices made by the lizards to live in trees rather than remain on the ground and be eaten by predators is any different to the way I understood evolution to work in general. The way I see it in this case living in the trees is more likely to make you live long enough to breed than continuing to live on the ground, animals with shorter legs are better at climbing trees and more likely to be able to get up them in time rather than their long legged cousins who get eaten. Does the article suggest that those animals with long legs don't take to the trees for their survival or that they do but are just not good enough at tree climbing to escape successfully ?
Basically it looks to me like the physical attributes of the animal are determining who is evoloutionarily successful and its simply the pressure of the enviroment which is creating a shorter legged species which prefers to run up trees.
I'm surprised these people seem to be the first to start looking for impact craters in the Ocean, being as it covers 3/4 of the globe it stands to reason that 3/4 of all impacts are going to end up in the Ocean somewhere. Maybe it's just a case of only having the necessary technology available fairly recently but I think we ought to be doing everything we can to understand how often and how much damage asteroid strikes occur and can inflict.
Also the size of the Tsunami which created those chevrons must have been almost unimaginably huge but again its likely that for every impact of that size there would have been a lot more which haven't left such obvious signs but would still have been capable of inflicting similar destruction on coastal communities as the Indonesian Tsunami did a few years ago.
Although I think traditional science is a better method of investigating these sorts of incidents I think the idea of tracing back through myths and stories to reach an actual point in time where some group of people actually experienced the event is fascinating. Whether it's just wishful thinking or not and can ever be tied down this precisely is I think questionable.
Any event which caused waves of that size is pretty clearly going to make a big impression on anyone who witnessed any of its effects and would certainly have been talked about for a very long time but whether we can detect any of the story as it must have been originally told is, in my opinion, extremely unlikely.
I am more often a motorist than a cyclist and I have to say that in the main it's the motorists who don't drive with consideration to cyclists rather than the other way around.
For instance just last Friday I saw a guy making a right turn onto a main road ( dual carriageway ) simply pull out his side road right in front a cyclist who was doing around 20mph and only a metre or so away from the moron turning right. The cyclist luckily managed to slow down quite quickly and hit the morons door rather than flying over his bonnet. The moron was clearly in the wrong and yet he had the cheek to give the cylist a dirty look and shake his fist like it wasn't his fault. If I had been the cyclist I'd have probably dragged him from the car and smacked him one.
I guess it must be, if people don't understand the rules then I suppose they could be very dangerous but since the rules are very simple indeed there is no reason why roundabouts should be more dangerous than any other aspect of driving.
For English roundabouts the only things you rules you really need to follow are: Look to the right to see if there is anything coming If not carry on over the roundabout If so stop and wait until nothing is coming
Although in practice it also helps to try and get in the correct lane and watch out for traffic lights on large islands and people not in the correct lane veering all over the place and trying to hit you. Also watch out for road entrances which look like dual carriageways but immediately turn into single carriageways.
I think we call this arrangement tidal flow since the number of lanes open in each direction decreases and increases over the course of the day, like the tide on a beach.
The Aston "Expressway" in Birmingham is like this and I think it mostly has 7-8 lanes in total expanding to somewhere around 9 or 10 near Spaghetti Junction. In the mornings there's two lanes open out of Birmingham and 4 lanes into Birmingham.
I don't think you could do away with signs on large trunk routes like this since any junctions leading onto the road would be more or less lethal as everyone tried to get down the main route as fast as they could and people just tried to jump in more or less randomly. For example once I've finished driving down the Aston Expressway I have to go down the Gravelly Road, which is a dual carriageway, where even with lights there seems to be at least one person per day who manages to crash into traffic lights or other cars at junctions etc. For town centres though or residential areas I think it's a good idea.
I don't think MS would get anywhere attacking Linux its self with patents but they may get further with things which are interoperating with Windows, e.g. Samba which would be much harder to code around.
From Microsofts point of view its probably annoying that things like Samba allow things to work with Windows but that MS are getting no money from them for this interoperational ability ( I'm not saying they should do but I bet MS thinks they should ).
What we could be seeing is the beginnings of Microsoft trying to control these developments by forming agreements with some companies/projects and threatening those who don't play ball with litigation. I think one of the big selling points of Suse is it's groupware stuff which can deal with MS Exchange ( although I could be wrong ).
SCO's charges are even more nebulous, they have never said that Linux infringed on any of their patents and they haven't really claimed that any of their copyrighted code is in Linux either.
Instead they are claiming that because IBM developed AIX and Dynix from code SCO claims rights to and then engineers who had worked on AIX and Dynix also helped with Linux that they should get some money even though there is nothing of what SCO claims rights to directly in Linux.
Software is only patented in the US I think so even in the extremely unlikely worst case scenario Linux development can carry on unhindered outside of the US but to be honest I don't see MS going anywhere with his except to make these kinds of silly statements to spread a bit of fud about.
In some ways such a communication device to the future is similar to driving sheep over minefields, the only way our descendants can warn us about the dreadful things which are happening to them is if they have already have happened to them.
Assuming that our ancestors lives continue in the misery we have created for them whilst our new future is now bright and misery free for our new ancestors what would the incentive be for them to co-operate with us and whos to say that if they did tell us how to avoid that disaster we wouldn't set ourselves up for a different one, which the ancestors down our new altered timeline would experience and write back to warn us about. Surely we would just be swamped with information as the our ancestors for every possible combination of actions we could possibly undertake got in touch to warn us about their particular problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly I'm not really all that new.
I, and the article were talking about locking the phones functionality e.g. not being allowed to use bluetooth to synch with your computers address book and therefore being forced instead to use an expensive alternative service provided by the telco.
I know the sim card on phones is locked but in most cases you can have it unlocked by cancelling your contract and paying some cash to the provider. You can also probably unlock the sim yourself or find someone to do it for you.
I've no problem with SIM locks, if you're getting a phone for "free" it's fair enough the provider wants to make sure they get they money back by you using the service.
What I don't think is fair is the standard functionality of your phone being crippled in order to force you to pay out more in unexpected costs, I've never seen this in the UK ( which is probably because anyone trying it would find all their potential new customers migrating elsewhere ) and I'm glad that it's being addressed in the US.
I think the mobile phone industry can take off just fine without locked down handsets.
I live in Europe and I have never seen or heard of anyone who has their phones functionality locked down. Most people don't buy phones here, they get them for "free" when they sign up to a years contract. At the end of the year you get an upgrade to a new handset and can keep the old one and do what you like with it including using it on other networks.
"perhaps one day we can find new evidence that will reconcile both theories"
In fact we already have, it's been discovered that the bible is just some book written around 1700 years ago and has absolutely nothing to say about the origin of life, or any other scientific matters. As such it contains no theories and you can now discard it as anything but a fanciful fairytale.
As other people have mentioned you have to have a driving licence, insurance, MOT in order to drive on the road but you do not have to have the documentation on you at all times. In most cases you will be asked to produce the relevant documents at a police station within 7 days if you're stopped.
The problem the government says this system is addressing is that sometimes people lie about their identity and try to pretend they are someone else so there is no come back when they don't turn up at the station with their documents ( most likely 'cos they never bothered getting them ).
I see some problems with this however, firstly the only database of fingerprints they have to test against are those of known criminals who have been arrested at some point for something else. It's probably fair to say that people driving around without insurance or a driving licence are more likely to have criminal records than people who are driving legally but I bet that its going to be a fairly low percentage of people who are stopped and don't have the correct documentation are actually going to be matched in their fingerprint database. This obviously is going to make no difference whatsoever for the majority of people the police stop and whos identity they need to verify.
The two ways you could make this system work are either by embarking on a wholesale fingerprint collection drive with the aim of fingerprinted the entire population so that you would always get a match in the database or by requiring fingerprints to get a driving licence and checking against that database.
In order to get a set of fingerprints for each driving licence you'd need to persuade current licence holders to take the time out to go to the police station or a suitable location to be fingerprinted which isn't going to go down at all well and would be a more or less suicidal policy for any government to suggest.
The government has already made up a law to require anyone who is arrested to be fingerprinted whether or not they actually guilty of anything so it would seem they are aiming for the stealthy approach to gather all our fingerprints without us noticing.
At present they aren't legally allowed to demand fingerprints from drivers which is why in this trial they say they are not keeping the prints and you can opt out of providing them. You can bet that once they have forced the relevant laws through it will become an offense not to provide your prints when asked by a traffic cop and that they will be held on record forever. If this isn't the aim then this system is a total waste of everyones time and money.
Troll ? http://coppersblog.blogspot.co.uk/ although it doesn't say so on his site but read the book. It's amusing and depressing.
So in effect you believe that people may from time to time be affected by floods. I think you might just be on to something to here...
Muppet, aren't cedars the sort of trees which whip about in the wind ? He's describing a big cow or something swishing its tail to disperse the flies. If not a cow there probably around 1 million other more likely possibilities to consider before you can conclude it's a dinosaur.
Holy shit, rather than replying to your e-mail they realised you were posting on /. and decided it would be quicker to answer your query there. That is scary.
So it's OK to catch a hit and run driver if he is spotted and his number plate rememembered by a member of the public but it's not OK if his number is recognised by a camera system ?
The threat from the IRA seemed far worse and more likely to affect me than this current perceived threat from Al Quaeda or whoever. E.g. the IRA has actually blown up a lot pubs in my city which is something the latest terrorists have yet to achieve.
So far as I recall the measures taken against that were signs in swimming baths telling you to watch for suspicious packages and the absence of bins in stations everywhere so it's hard to see how the current ridiculous measures are justified.
Essentially I simply don't believe the goverment any more or whoever it is they trot out to tell us we should still be scared, maybe they are telling the truth this time or maybe they are simply trying to drum up support for their latest legislation e.g. ID cards. I think they still have to explain why they were putting tanks outside Heathrow when they were trying to convince us Iraq was a dangerous enough threat we should invade them.
That's surely the miners fault for going on strike not Thatchers fault for doing something about it.
A prominent police spokesman says that police are given the following directives before dealing with these kind of situations
If you're ever asked why you're doing what you doing simply repeat "Just following orders"
If you're asked what you're doing in a particular situation ( beating up protestors ) say "I am working to protect the interests of my corporate paymasters McDonalds & Starbucks"
You are making a mistake when you say that the cops could either stand there repeatedly tazering the guy or just leave and and do nothing. They had other options and in this case they should have used them.
Firstly the guy should have left when he was asked to and not made such a fuss, if I met him I'd probably think he was a prick and would enjoy smashing his face in.
However the problem is that the cops completely failed to handle the situation and ended up simply abusing the right they have to carry tasers. Either they haven't had any law enforcement training or they are just really really stupid I don't know but there were 5 of them and they were dealing with 1 kid who wasn't behaving violently and wasn't drunk or anything like that.
I have seen 2 female and 1 male ( British ) police offices take out a huge 6'6" bloke was plastered and trying to kill them all, if they can do that then there is no reason why 5 competant officers should have any trouble with this guy. They have the cuffs on him, he's just lying there all they need to do is either leave him to cool down for a bit of between the 5 of them pick him up and carry him out the van.
Their behaviour on that video is indefensible, repeatedly tasering the guy obviously wasn't getting them anywhere, it didn't get them anywhere and seemed to me more like the cops just wanted to take out a bit of anger on the guy. Also they shouldn't threaten to start tasering the crowd around them for asking for their badge number.
"Now when we finally get a sustainable fusion reaction that produces more energy that it uses, that would be something to write about!"
I agree and I think the more 17 year olds we have building stuff like this the closer we will come to realising that goal. Who knows maybe one of them will make a mistake and discover something unexpectedly useful, the less people you have experimenting the less likely you'll discover anything new.
I live in Birmingham and worked for a company once which had taken on a contract from Birmingham City Council to digitise their land records. I think the Council had been working on it for a few years without getting anywhere before they handed it over to the company I was working for. The whole thing was a total disaster, by the time I left it was already over 6 years late which was partly the company I was working fors fault for not anticipating the uselessness of the council in organising their end of things and partly the councils for being totally incompetent at doing any of the things they said they would do in order to allow us to do anything and not managing us, as their contractors, very well at all.
Unless things have changed in the council over the last 10 years I would imagine they are just as incompetent at anything they turn there hand to. I think it was only last week that we heard the manager of the streetlighting division had recieved over £70,000 for a years work where he had in fact been off sick for the entire year. This wouldn't be so bad if hadn't also managed to pick up another few tens of thousands of pounds for overtime, when he is off work sick. The council said we shouldn't make a fuss about this since the stress it might put the man under would only mean he would be off work for longer.
Come to think about one of the councils employees who used to liase with us spent a good 4 months off sick and then went on a month holiday which she later claimed back and took again because she said she had been sick during the first one and so it wasn't a proper holiday.
I really don't think it works like that, anoles with shorter legs are better at climbing trees but they don't start developing shorter legs in order to climb trees. Instead because they are climbing trees this leads to an advantage ( not being eaten ) over their cousins who are not so good at climbing trees.
What you seem to be suggesting is that the anoles thought to themselves, "Hmm, we'd be better off with shorter legs, lets make our kids have shorter legs".
I suspect they are largely arguing how to how the mechanics of evolution work rather than suggesting entirely seperate theories which take nothing from evolution at all. This is exactly the same as any scientific work so if you're saying that evolution is controversial then you must also be saying that all scientific theories are controversial.
I would say that we expect their to be disagreement about scientific theories and this is in fact the default position to take so for a scientfic theory of any kind to be described as controversial it needs to have the majority of those involved putting forward good arguments as to why the whole thing should be changed. I don't think evolution is in that situation and therefore I still don't think it can be described as controversial.
I'm not sure I agree with you about the possibility of any controvesy here. I, obviously, haven't read the article so I'm just responding to your comments here.
Firstly Evolution is not always controversial, a massively insignificant minority occasionally try to cast aspersions upon it but this doesn't make it controversial.
Secondly I don't see the choices made by the lizards to live in trees rather than remain on the ground and be eaten by predators is any different to the way I understood evolution to work in general. The way I see it in this case living in the trees is more likely to make you live long enough to breed than continuing to live on the ground, animals with shorter legs are better at climbing trees and more likely to be able to get up them in time rather than their long legged cousins who get eaten. Does the article suggest that those animals with long legs don't take to the trees for their survival or that they do but are just not good enough at tree climbing to escape successfully ?
Basically it looks to me like the physical attributes of the animal are determining who is evoloutionarily successful and its simply the pressure of the enviroment which is creating a shorter legged species which prefers to run up trees.
I'm surprised these people seem to be the first to start looking for impact craters in the Ocean, being as it covers 3/4 of the globe it stands to reason that 3/4 of all impacts are going to end up in the Ocean somewhere. Maybe it's just a case of only having the necessary technology available fairly recently but I think we ought to be doing everything we can to understand how often and how much damage asteroid strikes occur and can inflict.
Also the size of the Tsunami which created those chevrons must have been almost unimaginably huge but again its likely that for every impact of that size there would have been a lot more which haven't left such obvious signs but would still have been capable of inflicting similar destruction on coastal communities as the Indonesian Tsunami did a few years ago.
Although I think traditional science is a better method of investigating these sorts of incidents I think the idea of tracing back through myths and stories to reach an actual point in time where some group of people actually experienced the event is fascinating. Whether it's just wishful thinking or not and can ever be tied down this precisely is I think questionable.
Any event which caused waves of that size is pretty clearly going to make a big impression on anyone who witnessed any of its effects and would certainly have been talked about for a very long time but whether we can detect any of the story as it must have been originally told is, in my opinion, extremely unlikely.
I am more often a motorist than a cyclist and I have to say that in the main it's the motorists who don't drive with consideration to cyclists rather than the other way around.
For instance just last Friday I saw a guy making a right turn onto a main road ( dual carriageway ) simply pull out his side road right in front a cyclist who was doing around 20mph and only a metre or so away from the moron turning right. The cyclist luckily managed to slow down quite quickly and hit the morons door rather than flying over his bonnet. The moron was clearly in the wrong and yet he had the cheek to give the cylist a dirty look and shake his fist like it wasn't his fault. If I had been the cyclist I'd have probably dragged him from the car and smacked him one.
"Suicide Circle" ??
I guess it must be, if people don't understand the rules then I suppose they could be very dangerous but since the rules are very simple indeed there is no reason why roundabouts should be more dangerous than any other aspect of driving.
For English roundabouts the only things you rules you really need to follow are:
Look to the right to see if there is anything coming
If not carry on over the roundabout
If so stop and wait until nothing is coming
Although in practice it also helps to try and get in the correct lane and watch out for traffic lights on large islands and people not in the correct lane veering all over the place and trying to hit you. Also watch out for road entrances which look like dual carriageways but immediately turn into single carriageways.
I think we call this arrangement tidal flow since the number of lanes open in each direction decreases and increases over the course of the day, like the tide on a beach.
The Aston "Expressway" in Birmingham is like this and I think it mostly has 7-8 lanes in total expanding to somewhere around 9 or 10 near Spaghetti Junction. In the mornings there's two lanes open out of Birmingham and 4 lanes into Birmingham.
I don't think you could do away with signs on large trunk routes like this since any junctions leading onto the road would be more or less lethal as everyone tried to get down the main route as fast as they could and people just tried to jump in more or less randomly. For example once I've finished driving down the Aston Expressway I have to go down the Gravelly Road, which is a dual carriageway, where even with lights there seems to be at least one person per day who manages to crash into traffic lights or other cars at junctions etc. For town centres though or residential areas I think it's a good idea.
I don't think MS would get anywhere attacking Linux its self with patents but they may get further with things which are interoperating with Windows, e.g. Samba which would be much harder to code around.
From Microsofts point of view its probably annoying that things like Samba allow things to work with Windows but that MS are getting no money from them for this interoperational ability ( I'm not saying they should do but I bet MS thinks they should ).
What we could be seeing is the beginnings of Microsoft trying to control these developments by forming agreements with some companies/projects and threatening those who don't play ball with litigation. I think one of the big selling points of Suse is it's groupware stuff which can deal with MS Exchange ( although I could be wrong ).
SCO's charges are even more nebulous, they have never said that Linux infringed on any of their patents and they haven't really claimed that any of their copyrighted code is in Linux either.
Instead they are claiming that because IBM developed AIX and Dynix from code SCO claims rights to and then engineers who had worked on AIX and Dynix also helped with Linux that they should get some money even though there is nothing of what SCO claims rights to directly in Linux.
Software is only patented in the US I think so even in the extremely unlikely worst case scenario Linux development can carry on unhindered outside of the US but to be honest I don't see MS going anywhere with his except to make these kinds of silly statements to spread a bit of fud about.
In some ways such a communication device to the future is similar to driving sheep over minefields, the only way our descendants can warn us about the dreadful things which are happening to them is if they have already have happened to them.
Assuming that our ancestors lives continue in the misery we have created for them whilst our new future is now bright and misery free for our new ancestors what would the incentive be for them to co-operate with us and whos to say that if they did tell us how to avoid that disaster we wouldn't set ourselves up for a different one, which the ancestors down our new altered timeline would experience and write back to warn us about. Surely we would just be swamped with information as the our ancestors for every possible combination of actions we could possibly undertake got in touch to warn us about their particular problem.