Or at least one that isn't a menace to civilized society.

You are clearly not a member of any civilized society. Go jump off a cliff.

Assuming you actually had a patent on a codec, you could certainly give out a royalty free license to companies or people who gave the source code of an implementation out. There is no law that would prohibit you from doing this. You could even do like some of the GPL companies like Aladdin or Trolltech -- in fact, you could do their business model one better, because you could license your patent in conjunction with multiple software implementations from different authors, under different licenses.

Of course, the world might change after the Supreme Court decides Bilski, but to take a real-world example, back when CompuServe decided to be stupid and start charging royalties on GIF implementations, wouldn't it have been smarter of them to say that, if your implementation is under the GPL, then there is no royalty? They killed that golden goose about the time it should have started laying them some serious eggs if they had treated it better.

So, if an implementation of GIF was under the GPL (and also available not under the GPL) both the software author and the patent holder could have profited from selling the non-GPLed software version (these could be one and the same entity/person, but that's not strictly necessary). A sane strategy would have charged "x" dollars for the use of the patent, "x+y" for the patent + software, or "0" for the software and patent in a GPLed application.

You cannot selectively license a patent (0|+inf)

I don't know what you think people do with patents, but most patents are, in fact, quite selectively licensed.

The upload speed is not inherently limited to 33.6k. In fact, the V.92 standard allows up to 48k upload speeds but that increase comes at the cost of reduced download speeds.

It does? 2 (B)earer channels for data and the (D) channel is X.25 packet and call set up & tear down. There's no "out of band".

So would gasoline.

It sounds like your small S corp consultancy that helps people run their businesses could use a small consultancy to help you run yours. At the very least you probably should learn a bit more about contracts and meeting requirements somewhere, having a piece of software that writes you a contract by popping up a dialog box "Enter Consultants Name:" isn't going to work out very well. At the risk of committing slashdot heresy, I'd suggest books. There is a large and well established free repository of them near you, it's called your local library.

Tax software is hardly simple, though I agree it is on the technical side. Not only is there no "internationally agreed XML schema for the taxman to publish this years' tax legislation", but there is no formal record of this year's tax schema at all. The tax laws are riddled with vaguely worded provisions, some of which (in the US) have been clarified by IRS advisory opinions, tax court precedent, or regular court precedent. You basically need a team of lawyers from every jurisdiction to even figure out what the tax code is. Encoding it in software is the relatively easy part.

Oh, and there are constant updates to it, some of which come out so late that patches ideally should be out 1-2 days after the new regulation is announced. Who is the volunteer who is going to spend their life monitoring the IRS's press releases and patching tax software?

well. i actually like the story. i thought the implementation of the story was not as good. i tend to give sci-fi a little more slack than other genres. i think doing an excellent job of telling a sci-fi story is very, very hard to do in a movie because of the special effects in requires and the sheer amount of time to build up the future / alternate universe where it takes place. star wars is in a special class because the universe is *vastly* different than anything we know.

i compare it to my all-time favorite sci-fi, bladerunner. an excellent movie by all accounts, but the story still happens on an earth that is not so far off from what we have today, with no aliens, without space travel, with androids that conveniently look just like humans. it's much easier to write a consistent compelling story if you intertwine it with real life facts that people already understand and have some familiarity with.

Next stop India. "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

do you remember luke whining like a 5-year old baby when he couldn't make stuff float around the first time he tried it when yoda was training him? do you think walking talking teddy bears are any less child like than cheesy two-headed pod racer announcer? how about the silly teenager-ish sexual tension between han and laia? i can go on and on if you like.

in all forms of storytelling, be it movies, books or verbal, you have to put some effort into it. there are always some thing that don't seem right and places where you need to let your imagination fill in the blanks. you are just lazy and impossible to satisfy anyway if you can't do that.

We did an extensive study and pilot of thin clients recently. Even at $260/thin client, when you consider the back-end servers, storage, VM licensing (on both the server and thin client), and recurring costs -- thin clients worked out to be about $710/unit. We currently buy desktops for $650/unit, and this actually gets worse over time due to licensing costs.

As I understand, solar activity correlated for most of the time we have direct temperature records, but the correlation diverged markedly in the last two decades. Solar activity having reduced in that time is unable to explain the continued rise in temperature. http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm Solar activity is therefore not something I can use to explain currently warming trends.

The "greenhouse effect" in any sense of the word not a closed system. Even a glass greenhouse has external energy input via sunlight and output via the gradual dissipation of heat into its environment via the contact of glass with air. The distinction is false.

As if changing the world economy is a bad thing. The standard of living of billions of people is already poor and developed nations grapple with traffic congestion, pollution, rising grocery prices due to poor planning and energy security. Trillions of dollars were spent on saving the economic system from collapse and bailing out banks to preserve a world economy that didn't work particularly well. Commitments to save the planet pale in comparison by orders of magnitude.

By which time projections say we will be too late.

Let's talk about driving a Saab in Europe. back in the days Saab had a European pickup program where you would get 5% off list, two round trip coach tickets to the factory and shipment back to the sates. I picked up a 2001 9-5 Aero at the factory in Trollhaten and drove it for 3 weeks all over the place. From Sweden to Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brugge, Zurich, Vaduz and back through France to drop it off in Paris after 3500 mi at 120 mph every day. What a way to drive that car!!! At that speed it had unbelievable handling. Travel like this is something you can't really do in the US or even in the EU anymore...

Now almost 10 years later it has 110K and I can still get it over 110 on those lonely stretches.
Still looks pretty sharp and gets 30mpg. Pretty much regular maintenance. I love it and hope it lasts another 10 years.

Do you understand what the tower of Babel of different mobile phone protocols the North American market is? If not, please reread the posting to which you replied, as he mentioned those issues (e.g., "And of course a GSM phone cannot be activated on a CDMA network or vice-versa.")

Here in the US, you can unlock a phone you got for, for example, the AT&T mobile phone network, and you will not be able to use it on, for example, the Verizon Wireless mobile phone network, for purely technical reasons - AT&T uses GSM and UMTS, Verizon use cdmaOne and CDMA2000. There in the UK, all providers, as far as I know, use GSM and UMTS.

That's why he said "unlocked US cellphone", not "unlocked cellphone". He wasn't saying "unlocked cellphones aren't useful anywhere", he was saying "unlocked cell phones aren't useful in the US market".

"'I'd pick up a book on the programming language they're using to code.Even if you never put your fingers to the keyboard, it will gain you credibility, which will make you, as a manager, a thousand times more effective."

Only thing worse than a manager that doesnt know anything is a manager that has read a book on the programming language your using to code