What nonsense. Businesses exist to help people cooperate and create enough value for their customers that the customers are willing to give them money. If that's more than the company spent, yay! we have a profit, otherwise the company eventually disbands.

My motivation as a worker is to find a way to use the least amount of my time to generate the most amount of value so people give me the most amount of money so I can spend it on my family (modulo not doing something I hate, is illegal, etc.). Meter readers just found out they made a bad call like many buggy whip makers, stone carvers, hand cart pushers, machinists and zillions of other obsolete occupations. They don't add any value any more, not when a $25 piece of electronics can do it for them. And as a rate payer, I'm not paying them to be inefficient.

If you take your reasoning to it's next logical step, we should ban email, faxes, video conferencing, robots, computers, most software and the wheel. Won't anyone think of the hunter-gatherers?!?

In what way is prohibiting voluntary binding contracts between a consenting adult and a private company a libertarian (big or little L) position? That's a Liberal (in the socially intrusive, not liberty-loving sense) idea.

First thing I do to new computers is remap caps lock to control, the way God and RMS intended. I move escape too. Annoys the snot out of my wife and kids, but that's hardly my problem.

I'm not really sure why that much keyboard real estate needs to be dedicated to search. Seems like a goofy default.

I seem to recall Xilinx offering a FPGA with an embedded PowerPC core 8-ish years ago. Or maybe it was four cores, I heard it from a co-worker.

Seemed like a fun part to hack around with. Too bad we never got to use any.

I think the key bit is not to filer or prioritize based on source or destination.

I'm OK with the idea of prioritizing or throttling based the type of traffic. If the link is congested, perhaps all streaming video gets throttled so VoIP still works. But the important neutrality bit is all video gets throttled regardless of whether it comes from YouTube, NetFlix, NBC or barnyardanimalsex.com.

I can neither prove nor disprove that assertion. The fact than H.264 is encumbered by a ton of patents tells me that many non-academic parties were involved. Having worked in the video industry, I know tons of companies just implement the standards, they don't try to extend them.

I don't agree. I think an algorithm is more like a device and fits the patent model better. The flow chart and quantization matrix were the important parts, not the characters in a file. Besides, do you want h.264 copywritten for the next 75 years?

My point is, with the prospect of licensing revenue, math research is aliver and weller.

I'm not up on the details, but I thought that was the whole point of MPEG-LA, one stop shopping for all your video licensing fees. I'm much more concerned about everyone else. I have no idea if any software I write infringes on some submarine patent. I agree, that's a real cost. But I think the solution is not to toss all software patents but instead to tighten the requirements before issuing one.

Maybe. Sure, lots of companies want better compression (Google, Netflix, Apple to name a few). Is that enough? I don't know. My point is, there are a ton of other small, no-name players who can contribute, but only if they have the prospect of licensing revenue down the line. With out patents, at least some of them will not bother doing the research, so the pace of innovation will slow down. The judgment call is whether that speedup is worth collateral damage.

Also, don't get me wrong. A lot of software patents are asinine. My company encourages us to file patents to build a portfolio. We don't generally intend to license any of them, it's only a defense when we get sued for infringement. It's silly, but that's the way the system works today. I'd be perfectly happy setting a much higher bar for what is obvious, plus requiring a working implementation.

It's defensible because someone had to do the research to figure out the H.264 algorithms. In retrospect, it's easy to say "Duh, of course quarter-pixel motion estimation is a good idea", but someone had to do a lot of grunt work to prove that's really the case.

I'm quite certain math geeks are beavering away at new compression algorithms in corporate labs. Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents. Not all of it, just a lot. So the benefit to society is we get a 2160i video standard this decade, not next. Is that worth it? I don't know, maybe, but it's not cut and dried.

I got a crazy idea: how about charging the same rate, regardless of which artificial political boundary they cross?

What was revolutionary about a DVR vs. VCR is (a) you can record while watching and (b) it's much more reliable (since you don't have to pre-position the blank tape). All DVRs also include a program grid, something that I've never seen in a VCR. That's not really required, per se, it's just one of those things that was possible in the timeframe DVRs were introduced but not when VCRs came out.

Anyway, having used both, a DVR really is a different experience, not an evolution, much like a bird evolved from a dinosaur but really isn't one any more.

That's where things don't work for me. I don't like to always line things up on rigid tab stops. But you're right, if you always use only one or the other, things work out fine.

It's things like this that convinced me using spaces is the only way to fly. You also need an editor that knows how to indent to the right place by inserting the right number of spaces (i.e. not vi out of the box or notepad). Anything else will always get screwed up by someone or some tool.

How about they divert snow from Moscow first?