You might want to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... . It agrees with what I had said. I have never heard of a particle (with a rest mass) travelling at the speed of light, even in the early universe. Can you be more specific in your assertions? According to special relativity, a particle (such as an electron or proton) travelling at the speed of light would have infinite mass (which would cause problems). I have heard of particles travelling very close to the speed of light. Can you provide a cite for the speed of light changing? I have never heard that before.

There was a time in the development of the universe where space and time itself essesntially expanded faster than the speed of light. It is pretty widely accepted physics. But this inflationary period after the big bang wasn't technically "faster" than light travel, because the definition of "faster" was bound up in the expansion of space and time. (If the space-time I am standing in expands, am I "moving"?) So, there is a physical process where matter and energy do something like faster than light travel, but not really. I imagine we could better understand this inflationary process and exploit it in the future to do something that isn't technically "travel". Many things that have been impossible in the past are now possible (space travel). But many things that were impossible in the past remaln impossible (FTL travel). We don't know what the future science will be. So it is best to keep an open mind and not assume anything one way or another, with a bias towards "I won't believe your claims until you demonstrate them to skeptical physicists who subsequently change their minds. Currently, no reputable physicist believes inflation makes faster than light travel possible.Experimental results, or it didn't happen."

I like your basic point: completion of the disclosure should be irrelevant when considering the date of the invention! Who are these Time Nazis who run the USPTO?

Sure, that will work. I'm sure the folks at Apple can just tell the Chinese and Koreans not to blatantly copy their products, because it is rude.

The problem is in the number of possible combinations. Even if you take a small number of possible elements, and a smaller subset of chosen elements from that original set, you start generating serious numbers of patents. Say you were going to make a new bar code reader. You have 20 possible things you can put in that bar code reader. Rotating 8 sided mirror. Rotating 6 sided mirror. Oscillating mirror. Shape memory alloy actuators. DC motor drive. Stepper motor. Fixed mirror set. Red diode laser. Infrared diode laser. LED lighting. CMOS imager. Light sensitive diode. CCD imager. Fresnel lens. Cylindrical lens. Holographic lens. Etc. It would be very easy to find many more than twenty elements for "things to make a bar code reader". Just, for ha-has, stick with 20. Now, say your novel invention comprises a six element combination not found in other bar code readers. How many possible combinations? You ARE relying on a computer to brute force this, aren't you? Well, that's 20 x 19 x 18 x 17 x 16 x 15 possible combinations for six elements chosen from a possible field of 20. That's 27,907,200 combinations. (Please don't quibble over my mathematical simplifications). That would be more patent applications than have ever been filed in the U.S. All your patent applications would say so far is that you have six elements, not how they are configured or how they function. There are a ton of ways you could configure an 8 sided rotating mirror, especially if it is interacting with a fixed mirror set, or an oscillating mirror set.

.

So if you wanted to patent all the combinations, you quickly run out of money. The USPTO charges thousands of dollars to process each application. If you wanted to patent the algorithm, the USPTO has a special kind of rejection for you. It is called "undue experimentation". In other words, you would have to perform a ridiculous amount of experimenting with unworkable and wrong combinations before you found one that works. In yet other words, no one is teaching you anything new by saying, "try a bunch of different combinations; one of them will work". Duh. Edison knew that, but he did the hard work of actually trying all the combinations, and finding the very few that worked. So, if the computer program isn't actually intelligent, it will waste a whole lot of resources attempting to patent useless crap.

.

TFA says that one company is copyrighting all possible 400 word combinations in the English language. That is 400 elements chosen from a set of around maybe 100,000 - 250,000 elements (English words). Since the words are allowed to repeat, taking the 100,000 figure, we have 100,000 raised to the 400th power, or 10^2400 possible combinations. Say the company had a very fast computer and was able to express and thereby claim 100 billion 400 word combinations per second. It would need just 10^2389 seconds to claim each combination. In very round numbers, a year is about 10^8 seconds, so the comany would need about 10^2381 years to complete it's task. In very round numbers, the lifetime of the universe is about 10^10 years, so the company would need about 10^2371 lifetimes of the universe to complete it's task. Or a faster computer. Or a new law that says that a person doesn't actually have to express something in order to copyright it.

It's a judge's job to put bad guys in jail for a very long time. Usually the bad guys don't like it at all. The only thing keeping the bad guys from getting some revenge on the federal judges is the certainty that very extra super bad things will happen when they make even the slightest malicious gesture towards a federal judge. In short, we wouldn't have judges or a rule of law if we didn't protect the people working as judges. Seriously, would you want to tell a mob boss that he needs to rot in jail for 10 years, thereby disappointing many of his mob friends who had hoped maybe he could get probation? And then have some joker on the Internet who thinks it is an awesome prank to post your home address and other details of your private life? Nope, the joker is going to be exhibit A in the case of Federal Judge Smith v. Internet Joker, with Federal Judge Hammer presiding.

There could be things other than error rate that the manufacturer could point to. Perhaps noise bleeding into other audio components. If someone is using a tube amplifier nearby, there may be some noise pickup. But, the manufacturer would make these kind of claims to BS their way through, creating uncertainty by upping the technical issues. Can you imagine being an engineer tasked by the manufacturer to design these things? I mean, you would HAVE TO KNOW that all of the marketing would be utter BS, even more ripe, pungent and flagrant BS than is typically purveyed by the marketing department.

Because the medical researchers who developed the AIDS testing smart phone attachment didn't think of that, and you did.

OK, I dislike Verizon's business practices probably more than your typical person, but let me give you Verizon's perspective. Verizon is really trying to get a monthly minimum somehow or another. They have costs, whether or not you use your phone. Just walking around with your phone turned on, there is all kinds of signalling between your handset and various towers, using up some bandwidth. So, if you carried around your powered on phone all month, and sent just one text, how does Verizon make money charging you just 20 cents? However you paid for your bill, e.g. with your visa card, would probably end up taking more than 20 cents away from Verizon. You wouldn't be a profitable customer for them. So, why should they agree to make a deal with you that is unprofitable for them? I don't think you will find too many companies that will give you a flat rate per gigabyte (say $30), and then say, "Well, good afternoon, Mr. Gun, you sent just 30 texts and only used 50 kilobytes or .00005 gigabytes this month, so that will be $30.00 X .00005 = $0.0015. Are you putting that on Visa, or sending a personal check?"

Ignorance seems to spring from an eternal well. I believe there must be some force operating that removes knowledgeable people, and replaces them with ignorant ones!

I love what you have done with your homepage. Did you tile that whole backround yourself? Very shrub-like. It must have been a lot of work. You can't even see any grout lines!

It is a rather difficult problem for mobile carriers. Because their bandwidth is so limited, they are constantly looking for little games to play with packets, to make sure that people get the maximum use of the available carrier signals. Mobile carriers prioritize and throttle packets all the time. Most of it is to just reduce wasted bandwidth. The easiest example for anyone who hasn't worked in the industry to understand is voice packets vs. static data packets. The mobile carrier wants to make sure that your voice packets are not dropped, and delivered quickly enough to keep up with the sound wave data rate. If keeping your voice signal clear means making some other customer's web page load a tiny bit slower, then oh well. Video is smilar. You don't want your youtube playback interrupted, because it will ruin the experience, but if an excel spreadsheet takes .3 seconds longer to load, it won't much matter. But there are tens of thousands of these optimizations. There has probably already been substantial optimization to give advantages to packets from the mobile carriers. In the long run, it is better to cut this stuff off now, rather than wait until it grows into an intolerable monopoly situation. Mobile broadband is becoming increasingly relevant, and a direct competitor to cable broadband. There really are people who don't need their home computer anymore, and just use their phone. When 5G-LTE arrives, it may make the cable companies less relevant. So, Wheeler is right to address the problem now.

You are just wrong about this. It is about making all broadband carriers "common carriers" under Title II so that they must open their networks to competitors, and not favor their own services. So, Comcast can't throttle down packets from vonage, while passing their own voip signals just fine, or throttling down Netflix while providing their own video on demand service at a blazing speed. It pertains to mobile broadband, but it is not about wireless only. Where did you get that idea? If you read the article, you would see that the government is involved in your life anyway, like it or not. You should study game theory. It might clue you in why sometimes broadly applicable rules (aka laws) are necessary. Or do you think everyone would function perfectly fine without these crazy things called "laws"?

Tom Wheeler is actually a human being, not a faceless bureaucratic mouthpiece for the cable industry. Who would have thought it? I like his story about almost being the huge success that made AOL an also-ran in internet history, but for a rule that made the telephone network open, and the cable network closed. That is why so many people experienced the early internet at 1200 baud or 2400 baud, rather than 1.5 megabaud. Wheeler's early failure due to an FCC reg made a lasting impression on him. Now he has a chance to fix the problem that tripped him up. While the devil is always in the details, I like the direction he says he is going in. Kudos.

"perfectly well". That literally made me laugh out loud. So perfect!!! Yes, if you zoom out far enough, and look at the world as a whole, the world society lacks a single centralized authority. And world society, historically speaking, functions "perfectly well" with instability, wars, famine, injustice, rape, murder, apathy, ignorance, environmental destruction, and all the rest. That is just what people do, on a macro scale, and a micro scale. They need these things to evolve! The error in *your* thinking is that there is or ever has been any central authority anywhere. There have always been competing authorities, and competing rules, and competing systems, with borders and limitations. And evolution. And evolutionary blind alleys. Mutation, cancer, and disease (because there is no central progressive, socialist, communist, facist authority for DNA reproduction, and life functions perfectly well without it). Beheadings. Warlords. Conquest. Palaces and dungeons. Yes, as you say, "Most societies historically have functioned perfectly well without it." The earth continues to spin, and life continues to evolve into ever greater forms. Nice to see someone else thinking perfectly well for a change. Throw away your labels and ideals, and let us stand on the bones of our ancestors and have a perfectly good laugh! Or should we try to kill each other to decide who is right and who's children will laugh over our bones?