What do you think this is, France??

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Given that most people in this country can't divide 100 by 8 in their heads, I mock the thought that anybody would take this story seriously.

At what age should kids be taught to read patent-claim language?

At what age should kids be taught to replace head gaskets?

At what age should kids be taught how to cull facts from political rhetoric, rather than just repeat what they hear on the radio?

I think it would be worth a cheer to see pre-teens get excited about writing little BASIC programs on their iPads, but in the real world, school teachers I know would be happy enough to be able to teach the majority of their grade-schoolers how to balance a checkbook, or how to understand a short piece of classical music.

>The First Amendment has no real part in this. The First Amendment is between you and the government, only. It does not come into play in contracts between you and a web site operator, unless the operator is a government entity itself. That might involve the First Amendment, but I doubt it will be a significant issue.

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FWIW, the 1st Am. can become relevant if the government forces an entity to restrict speech, regardless of whether that speech is a term of a K. If I contract w/Facebook to give Facebook the right to publish and republish any text that I post, the 1st is implicated if the Federal govt. attempts to bar Facebook from enforcing that term. The 14th Am. extends this issue to state govt.'s. And then, there's also the contract clause of the Constitution, although freedom of speech generally trumps financial protections.

>So my point stands: When it was that warm in Greenland, it was certainly warm in Canada and Alaska. So where did the polar bears live, if warmer water is lethal to them?

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.No, I don't have anything constructive to contribute here, but I just wanted to be sure that everybody saw this comment. It really brightened my day. Who needs SNL?

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Who says enabling technology is a good thing?

Easy answer -- you've got to compare apples to apples. (Sorry, couldn't avoid that one.) People here are discussing sales over an atypical time period -- the weekend after a major launch. Compare that number to a weekend after another, comparable, launch. Say, the iP 4, SIII, SIV, etc. An alternative is to, average out the brief post-announcement peak and compare sales over the first 60 days after each launch. If you want to mitigate the distorting effect of pre-announcement delayed sales, compare 60-day periods starting 30 days before each launch. Whatever. The point is that simply citing a single set of numbers, based on sales during a small, atypical period of time, without direct comparison to even nominally similar periods, as evidence of success or a failure of a product is not enough to support either proposition -- much less to support allegations of a longer-term trend.

>You make it sound like they hire a salesperson to go around and market their patent to potential customers. Or maybe you think the customers search for useful patents to license and then contact the inventor. Neither of these scenarios is common.

Not true. Variations of the first scenario are quite common. Your argument is circular. If you define "NPE" as an entity that engages exclusively in trolling abuses, then the only conclusion is that NPEs are abusers. It is certainly possible for a small inventor to create something new and valuable, but not have the resources to manufacture it. Here, the patent system allows the inventor to attempt to license the idea to a larger entity who is able to develop, market, manufacture, and distribute the resulting product. The fellow working in the office next to mine, e.g., is presently doing just that with a clever consumer product he recently patented. How is such a partnership an abuse of anything? And doesn't such a system promote innovation by encouraging an inventor to create a new technology despite the fact that she's just an average person with a dollar & a dream?

And how would humans survive there? No source of energy other than gravity. Solar is not an option. Also, what about the radiation? Remember that Jupiter is essentially an unlit star with both an enormous magnetic field and powerful radiation belts (a million times more powerful, in fact, than the Van Allen Belt) that extend beyond Europa's orbit. Humans couldn't get near Jupiter without extraordinary (and likely, at today's level of technology, impractical) shielding. See, e.g., http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3010/hiding-from-jupiters-radiation. Yes, I know I'm a buzzkill & that these types of things are fun to talk about while you sit around the bong with the dudes. Sorry.

Better stick to something you have a clue about. Maybe cigars? This issue has long been a real concern re:biometric identification on inherently insecure platforms. The point of vulnerability is actually the encoded data, not an image of a fingerprint, stored or not. This is one reason why you don't see biometrics used casually in consumer applications. When implemented, a real-world biometric scanner is usually part of a system that incorporates significant physical means of isolation. Using a biometric marker in a device as ubiquitous and insecure as a cell phone is idiotic. And it doesn't take a "privacy expert" (wtf that is) to understand that.

First Amendment case law dating back to the 18th Century has consistently defending the right to anonymous speech. The courts have long recognized that being forced to reveal one's identity in order to, say, criticize the government can have a chilling effect on free speech. The Bill of Rights doesn't generally apply to private citizens, of course, but the world doesn't seem to be going in that direction these days. Or even over the last hundred years -- see, e.g., J. Edgar. The problem now, I guess, is that we have the technology to easily make anonymous speech almost impossible -- so why not use it?? I think there's an Oscar Wilde quote about how the need to censor is one of the most powerful of human motivations -- next to it, the sex drive is nothing.

Sigh. Just more porn for the "the patent system is broke, man!" crowd. As an attorney myself (who makes most of my litigation fees defending clients against IP trolls), I assure you that the RICO Act can't be applied in this way. Whoever is taking DoubleClick's money to prosecute this case is the real criminal. I haven't researched the case law, but I'm nearly certain that this application of RICO has never resulted in a decision favoring a plaintiff. Sure, patent trolls are certainly abusers of the legal system (although, since the recent overhaul of the Patent Act, trolling has become a heckuva lot more difficult). But the aspects of the patent system that allow this type of abuse to occur are generally not specific to patent law. A patent troll, from a legal perspective, is no different than a person who makes a career of prosecuting slip-and-falls. If 10% of the problem is the concept of intellectual property as it exists today, 80% is rooted in fundamental characteristics of our legal system, which make it possible to extort money from victims by threatening them with frivolous lawsuits -- so long as the settlement is not significantly larger than the cost of a legal defense. Just ask the RIAA.

Why would any manufacturer / carrier offer or support such a product??

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Everybody has the right to masturbate, but if you can't answer that question with some crediblility, this discussion is a waste of time.

...are the real vectors. How else would you explain some of the most prominent mass delusions of the last few decades:

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- the President of the United States is not an American citizen

- the President of the United States is secretly a Muslim (and simultaneously a member of a Caucasian-hating "black Christian church" that is conspiring with Kenyan citizens to overthrow the United States)

- there has been a global conspiracy over the last 25 years among every government, national science foundation, peer-reviewed journal, and credible scientist in three broad fields of science to perpetrate a hoax that human-produced greenhouse-gas emissions are warming the planet

- second-hand cigarette smoke has no harmful effect on humans

- the Affordable Care Act will strip $700 million (or whatever the number is up to now) of benefits from Social Security recipients and will establish "death panels" who decide whether gravely ill citizens will be given life-saving treatment

- and the classic "seat belts kill more people than they save because they trap victims inside a car during a crash, rather than letting them be safely ejected."

If you have a free hour, check out the beautiful documentary "Chasing Ice," in which shows the results of photographer James Balog's technically challenging "Extreme Ice" project, which took multi-year time-lapse videos of receding glaciers in remote areas of Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, & Montana. The big finale, a five-minute real-time clip of a Lower-Manhattan-sized chunk of ice plunging into the sea, is something you'll never forget.

Biometric scans are usually hacked, not at the sensor, but at the data-encoding stage. I haven't read the article & don't know if it brings up this issue, but if your biometric data is stolen -- and it happens -- that's a far bigger problem than, say, a compromised password or SS #. Your fingerprint or retinal blood vessel pattern or whatever can't be reissued. You've lost that biological marker for the rest of your life.

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Consequently, using biometric security mechanisms on a mobile device is not something I personally think is a good idea.

...and this, class, is an example of argumentum ad hominem. In essence, it asserts that 25 years of research into climate-change -- research that is accepted by virtually every national government, every national science foundation, every peer-reviewed journal of even modest credibility in three broad fields of science, and the overwhelming majority of scientists worldwide in those fields -- is actually an enormous decades-long hoax. And the proof of this, um, extraordinary assertion, is the conclusory statement that there are "really rich people" who could reap financial benefits if the results of this research are true. Get it?

A more nuanced analysis would reveal that, if climate change is real, it will be a disaster for most of these national governments, many of whicfh are already a bit tentative in their finances. See, e.g., Australia. The cost to protect coastal urban areas will be astronomical, there will likely be large numbers of refugees (even in industrialized nations, but the problem will be far worse in the less-developed areas of Africa & South America), and the political issues alone will likely destabilize governments. Especially scary is that some of the countries likely to be hardest hit are nuclear powers, like Pakistan & India. So why in the world would nearly every national government -- including many that would resist agreeing with each other at gunpoint -- secretly conspire to perpetuate such a hoax.

Then again, some of the wackier denier types are the same people who believed with all their hearts that the President of the United States is not an American citizen. Or that he's both a secret Muslim and a believer in Reverend Wright's "radical black" sect of Christianity. Don't expect rational.

Jeez, relax & take a breath. This was just a short fluff piece. If you want to point a finger, point it at Slashdot, which increasingly fails to meet its primary obligation as a news-filtering aggregator. It seems like any kind of silly little thing can become a high-profile /. piece these days.

And, of course, maybe the membership deserves what it gets. Take a look, e.g., at all the self-important, clueless responses from Slashdotter Wikipedia Wile E. Coyotes. An idiotic statement like "A 24bit CD has a 144dB dynamic range and 1/33,554,432th of the signal will be noise" is wrong in so many ways. How many of them do you think even know how to pronounce 'Nyquist'"

As for the issue at hand, here's what I think is a reasonable analysis: Analog tape v. high-res digital files is a controversial topic on which reasonable minds may differ. Most truly knowledgeable people -- e.g., long-time contributors to "The Absolute Sound" -- listening through highest-quality gear (think Focal or Wilson) generally report that 15ips master tape played back on excellent-quality gear matches or exceeds the quality of any of their reference 24/192 digital recordings. Some of the newer tape decks and multi-hundred-buck tape reissues of classic rock albums (e.g., the limited rerelease of "Sgt. Pepper's" on tape) have apparently become sonic standards among the hardcore audiophile mags. Sweeping generalizations are, of course, by their nature conclusory, and there's no indication that Albini is anything other than a stopped clock, but I think that dismissing the possibility that analog tape may produce stunning sound quality is more often than not rooted in the arrogance of ignorance.

Reported in Wired over a year ago. Check out the cover story that described the Utah NSA construction. A paragraph is buried in there about reports within the encryption community about the NSA making a "game-changing" advance in encryption-cracking a few years after 9/11. I don't think I'm reading too much into it to interpret Wired's language as implying that cryptologists had figured a way to circumvent even 128-bit keys.

Or maybe I am? Read the piece and let me know what you think. The language does appear to be deliberately vague.P?