TCP is simple to use (from the view of someone doing network programming), but under the scenes it is crazy complicated to implement properly.
 
  Fortunately you really only need someone to implement a TCP stack once (in open source) and it can be reused in a multitude of operating systems. BSD pretty much set the standard for a TCP/IP stack (TCP Reno) and everyone went from there.

Stream protocols that offer error, flow and congestion control over heterogeneous datagram networks are NOT trivial.

TCP is not trivial at all. In fact & efficient algorithms to implement features of TCP is still an area of active research. IETF RFCs in various stages of standardization related to TCP probably amount to thousands of pages at this point, and it's still growing. Linux recently got a new algorithm for congestion control for instance: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~rhee/export/bitcp/cubic-paper.pdf

So all Israeli Jews are European? Really? Really?

Arab-Islamic terrorists like Hamas want the total extermination of the Jewish people and conquest of the world. Israel has every right to defend themselves from such psychopaths.

I remember On2 used to say VP8 (WebM) had far better quality than H.264.

Don't forget Google owns a lot of patents on video compression since they bought On2, and they have no intention of licensing them out for H.264. If MPEG LA wants to start a patent war with Google, they might find themselves counter-sued with the potential of their H.264 format getting recalled off the market.

We "fanatical FOSSies" are pushing towards a world where people are free to do interesting things with technology without needing permission or excessive upfront money. H.264 is not one of those technologies.

With regard to software specifically, this movement to strip an entire category of inventions of protection lacks nuance. What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents are people within the software industry itself, but usually not the real innovators. Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set? Because boy oh boy, if that's true, we're really overpaying software "engineers" then, aren't we?

What I find interesting is the biggest proponents of software patents are the patent lawyers themselves, and usually not software engineers. Well that that all interesting, because lawyers with their $10k filing fees and multimillion dollar lawsuit fees (usually by suing software companies) seem to benefit the most from their existence.

Understand, when a lawyer tells you what is good for your industry, run the other way. RUN FAST.

The "average Joe" doesn't give a dime to Oracle. It's the IT/software professionals that give millions of dollars of their departmental budgets to Oracle. The kind with an anti-Microsoft slant are even more likely to be doing this.

Ergo, Oracle should be VERY concerned of the opinion on Slashdot.

That's really not true. Blu-ray uses VC-1 also. VC-1 is the SMPTE (TV broadcast) standard, not H.264. The H.264 codec is far from being an total industry standard at this point. The real "industry standard" is MPEG-2, since all DVD movies (much popular then Bluray anyway) are all MPEG-2 movies. That's why an MPEG-2 codec costs $2.00 per unit with no upper cap, while H.264 is only 20 cents per unit, despite being a far better technology.

Yes, the vast majority of GPUs (even in embedded devices) can accelerate any kind of IDCT codec (VC-1 and Theora included).

VP-8 is a far better codec in just about every way (compression ratio, computational complexity, etc.). I just wonder what Google plans to do with it.