The patent has a priority date of May 11, 1998.

The US Supreme Court has decided that corporations, which are effectively anonymous, have the same right to free speech as individuals. Not only that but through a corporate shield, wealthy anonymous individuals can spend millions of dollars to spread the message and effectively bribe public officials through campaign contributions. We can't seriously argue against anonymity of free speech until that decision is repealed.

This is the same line of reasoning that the police use when they try to convince you to let them search your person or property without probable cause. All regimes are potentially repressive and one does not need to be an "activist" to legitimately seek to minimize exposure.

The claims of a patent do not have to be 100% novel, if that were the case it would be impossible to patent anything because nothing can be created in a vacuum. The standard is that at least one additional limitation must be provided that is novel, the rest can be taken directly from prior art. Additionally the novel material must be non-obvious and useful. Generally this is called an "improvement" claim.

Examples: Flat head screw => Phillips head screw. Light bulb => Frosted light bulb. Hammer => Ergonomic hammer. Method with some inefficiency implemented in old code from 1990 => Modified method with improved efficiency (note that the actual code, e.g. programming language, is irrelevant, the underlying method is the subject of patentability)

However what is often misunderstood is that a patent on an improvement does not give the inventor the right to actually practice the invention, they must first obtain right to practice the original patent. For example to make a frosted light bulb, I first must license the patent on the light bulb, or wait for it to expire.

There can be a later patent that contains an improvement on on the first. It is derivative work but contains some novel aspect. If that improvement is used in an implementation then it is in violation of the later patent subject to the later priority date. Usually one can find these derivative works by searching the USPTO for citations to the first patent.

Is reporting it to the BSA necessary or even adequate? They are a private entity, not the police.

Also the mere presence at the scene of a crime may not be sufficient for accessory, that would be considered accidental and not encouraging of the crime or its repetition through inaction.

If this wasn't the case it would impossible to legally operate a computer repair business without filing a police report on every customer with an unauthorized copy of something on their hard disk.

IANAL but I would call to question if the guy was actually in a position of liability simply by virtue of having discovered the software.

In acoustics measurement and audio engineering the criteria are completely objective, and the only thing that really matters is linearity. Unfortunately these are generally the very expensive systems because essentially nothing about loudspeakers is actually linear, in particular a loudspeaker voice coil is only approximately linear for small excursions where the magnetic field lines are approximately linear.

Sound quality on the other hand is highly subjective and people generally prefer a moderate amount of dynamic range compression which improves intelligebility in a noisy environment, and some harmonic distortion is also nearly universally preferred since it makes it sound more "rich" from the spectral smearing.

Historically the quality of amplification electronics in audio gear has gone up significantly over the last few decades, and at the same time the price of those components has gone way way down thanks to class-D amps that synthesize a time-varying voltage using high-speed digital switching. However, the quality of the actual loudspeakers has gone down dramatically, mainly because of the strong consumer preference for sound systems that are exceedingly small and/or integrated into television sets. Back in the '70s a loudspeaker was accepted as part of the furniture landscape, but no longer, and this is a huge disaster for sound quality as there is simply no way to make a full range system without a large surface area that enables the low-impedance coupling of the driver with the air. At the absolute smallest a full-range speaker cone should be at least 4 inches in a cabinet with about 6 inches depth... which certainly won't fit in my macbook... :(

With 38 km^2 of glass, its a window washer's wet dream...!

I'll bet if they polled people they would also say they hate email, probably even more than facebook. Email sucks--its impersonal and most people don't have the level of skill to use it effectively (i.e. reading, writing and typing), but they do anyways and doing so inflict their ignorance on the world.

Email sucks, so does facebook. Google sucks too, the web is full of useless spam and so are their search results. In fact computers basically just suck in general and have a huge potential for improvement at the human-interface level. G+ already sucks too, but marginally less so than the alternatives which is still enough that people will be jumping ship like rats as soon as they open the floodgates.

Somebody should let Rupert Murdoch know, he likes to buy imploding social networks.

I went through YUL (Montreal) a couple weeks ago and they had security drones with wireless barcode scanners checking boarding passes at every identifiable stage of the queue. By the time I got through security my boarding pass had been scanned no less than 12 times, which was a rather annoying experience. One of the drones said this was being done to measure time between different parts of the process.

So thats manual queue tracking on crack or something, but point being people are already conveying unique-id tracked pieces of paper...

Pilots expect to go through the machine every day over a 30 year career, and they already have the highest radiation exposure of any job except maybe astronauts. The addition of the backscatter machine increases their exposure by about 0.1% which is small but not totally insignificant. That said they are still well under the federal occupational limit of 5000 mrem per year.

Given the facts my best guess is that the pilot unions are actually more concerned about issues of privacy and humane treatment by TSA staff, and raising the issue of the backscatter machine is a tactic for gaining leverage in negotiations about things they actually care about.

High-altitude flight in a passenger plane exposes the body to a dose of radiation much larger than the backscatter machine.

- Eat cookies
- Take a nap
- Check the time again
- Double check your math
- Triple check your math
- Check the time again
- Put on Nike shoes
- Repent
- Burn down a church*
- Buy stocks
- Buy a sports car
- ...Profit?

* Not an actual suggestion

The dynamics of in-app purchases change the basic nature of game play, that much is certain. I think those dynamics present a conflict of interest or at least a moral dilemma of some sort. For example developers are motivated to create exceedingly frustrating and/or impossible "scenarios" that can be by-passed with a purchase, where those scenarios don't crop up until the user is sufficiently invested in the game-play to consider making the purchase. Its one thing to sell add ons / extra levels, its another to manipulate user behavior through what is essentially a form of false advertising. In the razor/blades scenario, we can at least say that the blades have a concrete value and the user can estimate the total cost of using that platform over time. Not so with a game that may require some unknown number of additional purchases to play. Its more like the neighborhood crack dealer "first hit is free" promotion.

Apple should revise the app-store policy to include consideration of how in-app purchase mechanisms are used. They already have a plethora of criteria based on what are essentially moral grounds, which is already a key value proposition of their app store vs the competition. Since they are presumably already benefiting from in-app revenue it might take a bit of convincing before they see the light (such as a class action lawsuit?).