And even if you did plan a crime, and use the plates, that's just more evidence against you and more leads for the police to follow.
Are you really arguing that criminals who plan their crimes are going to be deterred from doing a good job of planning? Perhaps you haven't realized this, but criminals try to maximize their chances of escape - that whole getting caught thing kinda defeats the purpose of being a criminal.
With such poor reasoning on your part, it is no surprise that you think public camera networks are without significant public risk.
All this will do is create a big black market for fake plates.
If you are going to commit a crime, make sure you pick up a 10-pack of fake plates and switch them out randomly during your arrival and your getaway. Even better if the fakes use valid numbers off other vehicles in the same vicinity giving the coppers two nearby "pings" to choose from. They don't even have to be high-quality fakes, just enough to fool the cameras and anyone else looking at them from a distance.
It shines up your plate so much that it doesn't appear in pictures. It looks all washes out to cameras.
It probably also makes the plate an even better target for LIDAR. Since both LIDAR and these traffic cameras use infra-red, I'd like to see a paint that was opaquely black (absorbant) to IR but clear in the visible spectrum.
When you're searching for fingerprints (a computationally-intensive task) you don't put every image up on the screen - you don't even store imagery, you store an encoding of the fingerprint and compare encodings (numbers). In reality it's done by humans, not computers.
Maybe in the UK, but not in US anymore. They do ten-print searches (fast) and latents (slow). It used to be that there were drawers full of prints and each section of some thousands had an "owner" who got to be intimately familiar with the prints in his section so that when a search request came in, they could make a good first pass guess if those prints were in their section of the catalog, and then they would manually drill down further. Talk about a tedious, mind-numbing job.
But you are right about the visuals, the searches are done based on minutae (whorls, loops, etc in the ridges) which are encoded as a searchable database and you only get multiple images of prints if there is too much ambiguity for the computer to resolve - so it kicks it out to a human to make the final judgement. Of course the results are only as good as the data, if the real prints aren't in the database or the submitted prints are too vague then you can get false positives and false negatives.
Re:FBI? NSA? Homeland Security? BullSh***
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
All I can say is I am in the know with regard to such matters and you are so amazingly wrong it is unbelieveable. There may be EXTREMELY isolated cases of such Machiavellian security measures, but it has been my experience that music CDs are always making it into secured areas and being played on secure machines.
This guy is NOT a troll. He is far more correct than the GP is.
I'm not arguing about the difference in scarcity. What I am saying is that the laws regarding real property vs "intellectual property" both have the same goals - maximum utilization ("innovation"), and thus saying that they have completely different goals is incorrect. Whether or not IP laws achieve those goals (any more) is beside my point.
IP law is designed to encourage innovation, and this use of it does the exact opposite. Real property law has completely different goals.
That's more like spliting hairs.
The intent of real property law is to produce the most efficient utilization of those (limited) resources which is expected to ultimately benefit society more than any other system would.
If you don't like DRM, suggest another way for them to sell music.
Easy.
Q: How has the internet changed things? A: The cost of distribution is now effectively zero.
No smart business will even try to charge for something that is free. Even if they have a 300% markup, 3 * 0 is still ZERO.
Q: What's left to charge a markup on? A: Labor costs.
The cost to create the album, book, movie or video game is where there is still opportunity to charge a mark-up. So, forget all about copyright which is (primarily) about controlling distribution. There is no value in distribution any more.
Instead, sell all the creations as work-for-hire to the public domain. Yes, let the public pay for the cost of creation plus whatever premium you can milk from them. If it costs $500K to produce an album, then ask for $1M up front from the public at large. Let the people pay whatever they think such an album will be worth to them. Take all those payments, put them into an escrow account and when it hits $1M you get to work. When you are done, release the finished album to the public domain and collect your $1M in payment.
This can work for the same reason that the cost of distribution is now zero - the Internet. The cost of collecting payments from millions of people is approaching zero too. We still need the right financial infrastructure to do it efficiently, but technically all the pieces are already available.
Q: How does "work-for-hire to the public domain" benefit the content creators? A: It substantially reduces their risks by guaranting the return on their investment up front.
Q: How does "work-for-hire to the public domain" benefit the consumers? A1: They will actually own the results - no worries about breaking the law to share with friends. A2: They have much more of a say into what kinds of entertainment get created - not advertisers, not studio execs, but the actual consumer gets to vote with his dollar before production which is far more effective than "voting" after the production is already finished.
Q: What if not enough money is collected to reach $1M? A: Lower the asking price, or give up and return all the escrowed money or spend some money on hype to encourage more buyers. This is the epitomy of a free market, no government involvement required at all.
This departure is probably no big deal. Every single "amicable" corporation acquisition that I have ever seen worked out the same way. The founders of the acquired company stay on board in order to help assure a smooth merger. But after about a year or so, they almost always take off for new projects. I suspect that sticking around until now was a contractual obligation on his part as part of selling the company.
These guys tend to be of two types - "startup" guys who don't think it is fun to run an established business, or a "control types" who aren't satisifed unless they are running the whole show. Either way, when they sell the company, they are no longer in the position that most appeals to them so they move on as soon as they can.
So, I wouldn't take this event too seriously, he's probably had short-timer's disease for the last six months anyway.
Look at when he reformed his military clique and when he won, there isn't much of a time difference don't count the time he spent in jail.
Again, how does this in any way show that the election was rigged? Failed coup plus jail time somehow equals increased power? Could we get at least one shred of evidence from you to support your claims?
Yes, Carter is a leftwing leader and he obviously has his biases. I said that his verification of an election hardly carries any weight.
And I say baloney. The Carter Center has shown no bias in certifying elections won by leftist parties versus those won by rightest parties. Support your claims with evidence.
Would you agree that if george bush verified a hosni mubarak landslide in Egypt that it would not be credible? same logic.
Not at all logical. George Bush does not run a world-renowned organization that ceritifies elections. If he did, and the group actually had the credentials that the Carter Center does, then his certification of an election in Egypt would have actual meaning. But he doesn't so all this is more hand-waving on your part because you have zero, zilch evidence.
Did you even read what i wrote? they both became full democracies after the cold war ended. It was much easier to remove the military dictator in s. korea that it is to remove the communist in N. Korea.
Yes, I read what you wrote, it was historically ignorant nonsense and I said so. Do you know how S Korea got rid of the military dictator President Park Chung Hee in 1979? He was assasinated in a coup attempt. There were no democratic elections until 1987. That is not in anyway an endorsement of some sort of nascent S Korean democracy - heck mainland China was more democractic than S Korea was then. So, once again you provide no evidence to support your claims, and when faced with evidence to the contrary you simply deny it.
Secondly, ad-hominem attacks are the mark of a person who has lost a debate.
And constantly making up stuff without a single shred of supporting evidence is the mark of a crazy man. You've illustrated a profound ignorance of world history and when faced with the truth you just make up non-facts to support your claims. Ain't nothing ad-hominem about calling you out for that.
I'm sure that in your bizarro world everything you've claimed is obviously true, requiring no proof, which is why you never offered any. But in the real world, your behaviour in the face of actual facts is clearly illogical.
Right, and you verified the elections of these people how?
You are so far in denial of the truth it is ridiculous. There is plenty of historical documentation of the fairness of those elections. Yet you waive your hands and with no proof whatsoever claim they were rigged. Stop lying to yourself.
Hugo chavez led a military coup to take over his country and then later was "democratically eleced" according to Jimmy carter. I am going to assume you consider his government legitimate.
You mean the FAILED coup of 1992 and his election, SIX YEARS LATER? In what bizarro world does a failed coup give one the power to rig elections over half a decade later?
As for the Carter Center's endorsement of the election, you cite that as if it is somehow a bad thing. Maybe in your bizarro Pat Roberston world it is, but in the real world there are few organizations with more credibility on election fairness than the Carter center. They aren't perfect, but at least he doesn't own gold and diamond mines in the countries that they monitor the elections of.
I can tell you one thing, if the US hadn't intervened in many of those countries, the wouldn't have free democratic govenments today.
Well, since they already had free and democratic governments when the US intervened to install non-free and non-democratic dictators I don't think you can really claim the eventual overthrow of those dictators as something that the US had anything to do with
As for your citations of n/s korea and taiwan/china - you REALLY need to learn some history. Freedom and democracy in both of those countries is only a recent phenomenon. Both of them suffered military dictatorships up until the mid-80s at least. Dictatorships that the US actively supported.
The fact that you marked me as a foe is just proof that you can't handle the truth and would prefer not to hear it at all - classic reaction to cognitive dissonance. Good luck with being an ostrich and all.
well saddam got 99% of the vote as do many dictators. My point is who are you to say a government is legitimate.
Dude, focus here - democractically elected - not sham elections. Ok? They were at least as legit as any US government has ever been. Dissonance can be hard to deal with, but please try to apply a little critical thinking first.
Your story highlights one of the biggest problems with this new category of "non-lethal weapons." - Since they are suppossedly "non-lethal" they are much more prone to mis-use by poorly-trained or even untrained operators. The results for many such "non-lethal weapons" can actually range all the way up to lethality when used "out of spec."
If I were you, I'd sue. If the company that actually sells the product can't be relied upon to use it appropriately, how can anyone expect their customers to learn and follow proper procedures?
Chile Colin Powell's statement: "With respect to your earlier comments about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of."
These things are going to be insanely valuable in years to come because of their incredible feature set, lack of DRM, and compatibility with so many other devices.
Which is why DirecTV is planning on a cut-over to MPEG4 in the next couple of years.
Has anyone had a chance to play with one of these? (Or been played with by someone with one of these like at the 2004 republican convention in NYC? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRAD)
Since it is just sound, and apparently high-frequency sound (thus relatively low-energy vs low-frequency sound) I wonder if something as simple as noise-cancellation headphones would provide significant protection against LRAD usage.
Will we see pirates wearing Bose noise-cancellation headphones and listening to pirated music while they pirate real ships now?
Their business model is only half of it. Freeloaders are the other half.
No, the problem is that their business model does not take into account freeloaders, much less try to make use of them, and that is why it is obsolete.
There are content creation business models that co-opt the natural human desire to share stuff - the RIAA and MPAA just don't want to accept that they have to change in order to keep up with the changing times.
The example of SS# is just that, an example. They also require address and name info which is not at all restricted - and what about the results of the credit history check - they ought to go right to/dev/null, but don't count on it.
And, for the record, I am not aware of the specific rules that Sarbox applies to SS#'s but given the history of such things in the USA, I have great faith that there at least a couple of loopholes that defang most, if not all, such protections. You know, such as a customer can waive sarbox protections and the company can require such a waiver before doing business or something equally silly along those lines.
If someone is going to sell information about you, they should ask your permission first. If you grant them that permission, then they should be allowed to do it. If you do not, then they should not be allowed to do it.
I don't see how this is hard to understand.
The hard part is the conditions under which you agree to let your information be sold. For example - most public utilities require SS# in order to get service. This means you really have no choice about providing that information to them - and today they can do whatever they want with it.
If laws were put in place to require permission, they will need to address the case providers of essential and nearly-essential services (airlines, banks, insurance, driver's licenses, etc) from demanding permission as a requirement of doing business with you. Because if such organizations are allowed to do that, then the concept of permission becomes meaningless.
Intel's compiler only supports AMD in the most basic way possible. It assumes that all non-Intel chips stopped advancing around the time of the Pentium 2. Meaning it will produce good SSE2 code, but that code will be wrapped in a if(chip==Intel) RunSSE2; else RunNormal;
You are correct. This either Intel CYA or Intel monopoly-abuse, depending on your perspective.
Regardless of perspective, you can diable this behaviour at the expense of making your binaries SSE2-only with a single compiler switch. Sorry, I do not remember it off the top of my head, I know of it because I looked it up last time./ ran a story about Intel's compilers "cheating" on AMD cpus.
MSR has a large pool of talent and the money to push this research endeavor farther than any other company or academic institution could, and that is something exciting.
Except that MS will just patent anything these guys come up with, making the information useless for another ~20 years by which point it will be obsolete anyway.
I'd prefer that MSR not be doing work on anything useful, that way others who aren't so patent hungry can actually produce something useful to the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
And even if you did plan a crime, and use the plates, that's just more evidence against you and more leads for the police to follow.
Are you really arguing that criminals who plan their crimes are going to be deterred from doing a good job of planning? Perhaps you haven't realized this, but criminals try to maximize their chances of escape - that whole getting caught thing kinda defeats the purpose of being a criminal.
With such poor reasoning on your part, it is no surprise that you think public camera networks are without significant public risk.
Switching out plates during a car chase isn't even plausible unless you have something built into your car like james bond.
If you are being actively chased, you can forget about the cameras, you need to worry about the people in the cars that are chasing you.
Paris went open source since her famous video went to the internet.
Nah, everyone knows that proprietary systems get 'rooted' more often than open source.
All this will do is create a big black market for fake plates.
If you are going to commit a crime, make sure you pick up a 10-pack of fake plates and switch them out randomly during your arrival and your getaway. Even better if the fakes use valid numbers off other vehicles in the same vicinity giving the coppers two nearby "pings" to choose from. They don't even have to be high-quality fakes, just enough to fool the cameras and anyone else looking at them from a distance.
It shines up your plate so much that it doesn't appear in pictures. It looks all washes out to cameras.
It probably also makes the plate an even better target for LIDAR. Since both LIDAR and these traffic cameras use infra-red, I'd like to see a paint that was opaquely black (absorbant) to IR but clear in the visible spectrum.
When you're searching for fingerprints (a computationally-intensive task) you don't put every image up on the screen - you don't even store imagery, you store an encoding of the fingerprint and compare encodings (numbers). In reality it's done by humans, not computers.
Maybe in the UK, but not in US anymore. They do ten-print searches (fast) and latents (slow). It used to be that there were drawers full of prints and each section of some thousands had an "owner" who got to be intimately familiar with the prints in his section so that when a search request came in, they could make a good first pass guess if those prints were in their section of the catalog, and then they would manually drill down further. Talk about a tedious, mind-numbing job.
But you are right about the visuals, the searches are done based on minutae (whorls, loops, etc in the ridges) which are encoded as a searchable database and you only get multiple images of prints if there is too much ambiguity for the computer to resolve - so it kicks it out to a human to make the final judgement. Of course the results are only as good as the data, if the real prints aren't in the database or the submitted prints are too vague then you can get false positives and false negatives.
All I can say is I am in the know with regard to such matters and you are so amazingly wrong it is unbelieveable. There may be EXTREMELY isolated cases of such Machiavellian security measures, but it has been my experience that music CDs are always making it into secured areas and being played on secure machines.
This guy is NOT a troll. He is far more correct than the GP is.
That's pretty good, you deserve at least as much karma as the GP.
I'm not arguing about the difference in scarcity. What I am saying is that the laws regarding real property vs "intellectual property" both have the same goals - maximum utilization ("innovation"), and thus saying that they have completely different goals is incorrect. Whether or not IP laws achieve those goals (any more) is beside my point.
IP law is designed to encourage innovation, and this use of it does the exact opposite.
Real property law has completely different goals.
That's more like spliting hairs.
The intent of real property law is to produce the most efficient utilization of those (limited) resources which is expected to ultimately benefit society more than any other system would.
If you don't like DRM, suggest another way for them to sell music.
Easy.
Q: How has the internet changed things?
A: The cost of distribution is now effectively zero.
No smart business will even try to charge for something that is free. Even if they have a 300% markup, 3 * 0 is still ZERO.
Q: What's left to charge a markup on?
A: Labor costs.
The cost to create the album, book, movie or video game is where there is still opportunity to charge a mark-up. So, forget all about copyright which is (primarily) about controlling distribution. There is no value in distribution any more.
Instead, sell all the creations as work-for-hire to the public domain. Yes, let the public pay for the cost of creation plus whatever premium you can milk from them. If it costs $500K to produce an album, then ask for $1M up front from the public at large. Let the people pay whatever they think such an album will be worth to them. Take all those payments, put them into an escrow account and when it hits $1M you get to work. When you are done, release the finished album to the public domain and collect your $1M in payment.
This can work for the same reason that the cost of distribution is now zero - the Internet. The cost of collecting payments from millions of people is approaching zero too. We still need the right financial infrastructure to do it efficiently, but technically all the pieces are already available.
Q: How does "work-for-hire to the public domain" benefit the content creators?
A: It substantially reduces their risks by guaranting the return on their investment up front.
Q: How does "work-for-hire to the public domain" benefit the consumers?
A1: They will actually own the results - no worries about breaking the law to share with friends.
A2: They have much more of a say into what kinds of entertainment get created - not advertisers, not studio execs, but the actual consumer gets to vote with his dollar before production which is far more effective than "voting" after the production is already finished.
Q: What if not enough money is collected to reach $1M?
A: Lower the asking price, or give up and return all the escrowed money or spend some money on hype to encourage more buyers. This is the epitomy of a free market, no government involvement required at all.
This departure is probably no big deal. Every single "amicable" corporation acquisition that I have ever seen worked out the same way. The founders of the acquired company stay on board in order to help assure a smooth merger. But after about a year or so, they almost always take off for new projects. I suspect that sticking around until now was a contractual obligation on his part as part of selling the company.
These guys tend to be of two types - "startup" guys who don't think it is fun to run an established business, or a "control types" who aren't satisifed unless they are running the whole show. Either way, when they sell the company, they are no longer in the position that most appeals to them so they move on as soon as they can.
So, I wouldn't take this event too seriously, he's probably had short-timer's disease for the last six months anyway.
Look at when he reformed his military clique and when he won, there isn't much of a time difference don't count the time he spent in jail.
Again, how does this in any way show that the election was rigged? Failed coup plus jail time somehow equals increased power? Could we get at least one shred of evidence from you to support your claims?
Yes, Carter is a leftwing leader and he obviously has his biases. I said that his verification of an election hardly carries any weight.
And I say baloney. The Carter Center has shown no bias in certifying elections won by leftist parties versus those won by rightest parties. Support your claims with evidence.
Would you agree that if george bush verified a hosni mubarak landslide in Egypt that it would not be credible? same logic.
Not at all logical. George Bush does not run a world-renowned organization that ceritifies elections. If he did, and the group actually had the credentials that the Carter Center does, then his certification of an election in Egypt would have actual meaning. But he doesn't so all this is more hand-waving on your part because you have zero, zilch evidence.
Did you even read what i wrote? they both became full democracies after the cold war ended. It was much easier to remove the military dictator in s. korea that it is to remove the communist in N. Korea.
Yes, I read what you wrote, it was historically ignorant nonsense and I said so. Do you know how S Korea got rid of the military dictator President Park Chung Hee in 1979? He was assasinated in a coup attempt. There were no democratic elections until 1987. That is not in anyway an endorsement of some sort of nascent S Korean democracy - heck mainland China was more democractic than S Korea was then. So, once again you provide no evidence to support your claims, and when faced with evidence to the contrary you simply deny it.
Secondly, ad-hominem attacks are the mark of a person who has lost a debate.
And constantly making up stuff without a single shred of supporting evidence is the mark of a crazy man. You've illustrated a profound ignorance of world history and when faced with the truth you just make up non-facts to support your claims. Ain't nothing ad-hominem about calling you out for that.
I'm sure that in your bizarro world everything you've claimed is obviously true, requiring no proof, which is why you never offered any. But in the real world, your behaviour in the face of actual facts is clearly illogical.
Right, and you verified the elections of these people how?
You are so far in denial of the truth it is ridiculous. There is plenty of historical documentation of the fairness of those elections. Yet you waive your hands and with no proof whatsoever claim they were rigged. Stop lying to yourself.
Hugo chavez led a military coup to take over his country and then later was "democratically eleced" according to Jimmy carter. I am going to assume you consider his government legitimate.
You mean the FAILED coup of 1992 and his election, SIX YEARS LATER? In what bizarro world does a failed coup give one the power to rig elections over half a decade later?
As for the Carter Center's endorsement of the election, you cite that as if it is somehow a bad thing. Maybe in your bizarro Pat Roberston world it is, but in the real world there are few organizations with more credibility on election fairness than the Carter center. They aren't perfect, but at least he doesn't own gold and diamond mines in the countries that they monitor the elections of.
I can tell you one thing, if the US hadn't intervened in many of those countries, the wouldn't have free democratic govenments today.
Well, since they already had free and democratic governments when the US intervened to install non-free and non-democratic dictators I don't think you can really claim the eventual overthrow of those dictators as something that the US had anything to do with
As for your citations of n/s korea and taiwan/china - you REALLY need to learn some history. Freedom and democracy in both of those countries is only a recent phenomenon. Both of them suffered military dictatorships up until the mid-80s at least. Dictatorships that the US actively supported.
The fact that you marked me as a foe is just proof that you can't handle the truth and would prefer not to hear it at all - classic reaction to cognitive dissonance. Good luck with being an ostrich and all.
well saddam got 99% of the vote as do many dictators. My point is who are you to say a government is legitimate.
Dude, focus here - democractically elected - not sham elections. Ok? They were at least as legit as any US government has ever been. Dissonance can be hard to deal with, but please try to apply a little critical thinking first.
Your story highlights one of the biggest problems with this new category of "non-lethal weapons." - Since they are suppossedly "non-lethal" they are much more prone to mis-use by poorly-trained or even untrained operators. The results for many such "non-lethal weapons" can actually range all the way up to lethality when used "out of spec."
If I were you, I'd sue. If the company that actually sells the product can't be relied upon to use it appropriately, how can anyone expect their customers to learn and follow proper procedures?
Oh come on - if anyone meta-mods that "troll" mod on my parent post, slap that bitch up please.
1 1
The move to MPEG4 is no secret, the first MPEG4 channels are already rolling out today:
http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=1031
Chile
Colin Powell's statement: "With respect to your earlier comments about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of."
Iran
Guatemala
Greece
There's lots more where those came from -- all democratically elected too. I hope you survive the cognitive dissonance.
These things are going to be insanely valuable in years to come because of their incredible feature set, lack of DRM, and compatibility with so many other devices.
Which is why DirecTV is planning on a cut-over to MPEG4 in the next couple of years.
Has anyone had a chance to play with one of these? (Or been played with by someone with one of these like at the 2004 republican convention in NYC? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRAD)
Since it is just sound, and apparently high-frequency sound (thus relatively low-energy vs low-frequency sound) I wonder if something as simple as noise-cancellation headphones would provide significant protection against LRAD usage.
Will we see pirates wearing Bose noise-cancellation headphones and listening to pirated music while they pirate real ships now?
Their business model is only half of it. Freeloaders are the other half.
No, the problem is that their business model does not take into account freeloaders, much less try to make use of them, and that is why it is obsolete.
There are content creation business models that co-opt the natural human desire to share stuff - the RIAA and MPAA just don't want to accept that they have to change in order to keep up with the changing times.
your comment about SS#'s is disingenous.
/dev/null, but don't count on it.
The example of SS# is just that, an example. They also require address and name info which is not at all restricted - and what about the results of the credit history check - they ought to go right to
And, for the record, I am not aware of the specific rules that Sarbox applies to SS#'s but given the history of such things in the USA, I have great faith that there at least a couple of loopholes that defang most, if not all, such protections. You know, such as a customer can waive sarbox protections and the company can require such a waiver before doing business or something equally silly along those lines.
If someone is going to sell information about you, they should ask your permission first. If you grant them that permission, then they should be allowed to do it. If you do not, then they should not be allowed to do it.
I don't see how this is hard to understand.
The hard part is the conditions under which you agree to let your information be sold. For example - most public utilities require SS# in order to get service. This means you really have no choice about providing that information to them - and today they can do whatever they want with it.
If laws were put in place to require permission, they will need to address the case providers of essential and nearly-essential services (airlines, banks, insurance, driver's licenses, etc) from demanding permission as a requirement of doing business with you. Because if such organizations are allowed to do that, then the concept of permission becomes meaningless.
Intel's compiler only supports AMD in the most basic way possible. It assumes that all non-Intel chips stopped advancing around the time of the Pentium 2. Meaning it will produce good SSE2 code, but that code will be wrapped in a if(chip==Intel) RunSSE2; else RunNormal;
./ ran a story about Intel's compilers "cheating" on AMD cpus.
You are correct. This either Intel CYA or Intel monopoly-abuse, depending on your perspective.
Regardless of perspective, you can diable this behaviour at the expense of making your binaries SSE2-only with a single compiler switch. Sorry, I do not remember it off the top of my head, I know of it because I looked it up last time
MSR has a large pool of talent and the money to push this research endeavor farther than any other company or academic institution could, and that is something exciting.
Except that MS will just patent anything these guys come up with, making the information useless for another ~20 years by which point it will be obsolete anyway.
I'd prefer that MSR not be doing work on anything useful, that way others who aren't so patent hungry can actually produce something useful to the rest of the world.