As a matter of strict values, I share your vision of a world where nobody goes hungry or cold. But I strongly disagree with your path to getting there. You consider a world where nobody has to work as a utopia. My observation is just the opposite. If you take effort away from people, they tend to become entitled, lazy, selfish, and (ironically, with more leisure time) miserable. They may have enough to eat, but they lose so much of their humanity that they become less excellent as people. There is intrinsic value to hard work. In my experience, people who work hard (up to a certain limit) are happier. A society of bored people is one where crime is rampant and people are full of envy and strife (because nothing begets envy like a sense of entitlement). And that's not even to mention practical issues, like the inflation that dogs basic income economies.

My "utopia" is one where everybody works hard when they're working. When they're not working, ideally, they're building strong nuclear and extended families, raising children with a strong work ethic, and teaching them that when they are able, they should help those whose efforts have been less fruitful than their own. That help involves, for example, helping people through tough times, or giving them a lift while they do something to improve themselves like get an education or start a business. The end goal is always for everybody to get to a point where they can support themselves by their own efforts, so that nobody is dependent on government largess (as opposed to everybody). In fact, government hardly enters into it, except for providing some basic infrastructure and emergency services.

Perhaps that society is not possible in our present human condition, but it is an ideal I would sooner seek after than one where an over-powerful central government deals with poverty by subsidizing laziness.

It would be kind of ironic if it were a software-only patent, since one of the reasons H.264 is amazing is the hardware acceleration built into everything.

By the time the patents on one codec have run out, bandwidth constraints cause providers of non-free media to switch to a new freshly patented codec

That seems silly.

Bandwidth is one of those commodities (like processor cycles) that gets cheaper as time marches on. Bandwidth now is easily a couple of orders of magnitude higher than a decade ago (and moving towards gigabit), and that was several orders of magnitude higher than the decade before that.

Further, its a cost center now. If you could halve Netflix's bandwidth costs, you'd be quite wealthy.

The real limits are a) on the decoding side: How much processor power, RAM, etc. does it take to create an image, and b) the quality of the decompressed video, esp. against theoretical limits

. Unfortunately for Verison disabilities activists can be INCREDIBLY noisy when they are shat upon, so I doubt our deaf friends are going to tolerate this guff at all.

But how would they know?

Go deaf dudes!

Hear, hear! <-- What I actually wrote before I figured out it was ironic, which would be fine, and probably insensitive, which is not. But I will echo your sentiment: Go dead dudes!

Cisco heard your concerns and has responded: Development and maintenance will be overseen by a board from industry and the open source community.

The source is open: you can read it, you can compile it and compare binaries, etc.

In fact, it is BSD licensed.

But that only covers the copyright. The patent is not opened (nor owned by Cisco), and seem to prevent derivative works.

Cisco paid the fees to use the patent in this one application, and open-sourced it to the world. Seems like a great solution, security-wise, and clever legally.

And, it becomes just more BSD code when the patent expires in... what, a decade? Or if the new Supreme Court ruling is found to invalidate the patent.

I'm not sure what I would do to protect my device (I'm not smart enough to make a device, so it's a moot point)

But I do know that it would be a toss up between trying to keep Google from opening the box, and trying to develop a tamper-evident prove that they did. I have no idea if the lawsuit would be worth enough to justify the costs... and whether I could patent it anyway.

Why update the browser at all then?

So they gave analytics teams an easier way to send info, so they don't have to rely on really iffy hacks that often cause all sorts of stability and performance issues?

You mean like cookies? Why are cookies not the appropriate solution to a standardized way to track users if they choose to allow themselves to be tracked.

if you had a good solution to Canvas tracking then why didn't you tell them?

Sure. Disable readback from the Canvas. Done.

If FireFox took a stand against stupid bullshit that costs more than it benefits, they could kill it. They're big enough to do so.

The chances that this "fast lane" will be used to service the deaf or blind is zero. This is the most ludicrous idea I have ever heard.
 

Hoover dam does not use the entire contents of Lake Mead in one day, stupid.

I don't think it produces 10x as much steam for a given amount of solar energy. What it does is produce steam at a solar intensity 1/10 of the level at which other things produce steam (the other thing is producing zero steam at the temperature this one is producing steam at).

I think the real result is you need the same amount of reflector as for other schemes, however it can concentrate the solar energy on an area 10 times as large, which may be much less expensive (due to it not requiring as much accuracy, and because the receiver is nowhere near as hot).

more like an awesome way for Google to grab a profitable patent in exchange for the prize money.

Except they are not claiming any of the IP, just a 100 hr license to use it for the test. Also, why they claim they will not open the box up.

But you never owned it in the first place... even when you had a hard copy. You only owned a license.

Google "First Sale Doctrine". You own a copy. Software is tricky because it comes bundled with a license to install it/run it. But the actual disks that contain the installer? Yours.

All these things go away if you buy a license directly from the stuido, and are guaranteed perpetual use

Yeah, but that won't happen. In fact, the studios are pushing for per-device fees, separating TV/Computer/Mobile rights, and going more towards a "per-view" model.

Even if they were willing to, even if that didn't cause all kinds of problems with residuals, even if it didn't impose a perpetual and unbounded cost on the studio... what happens when the studio goes out of business? How does fulfillment actually happen

My problem with physical media is that it's not possible to carry it all with you... so when you want to take a road trip you have to be selective and predict what your kids are going to want to watch.

You could ask them ahead of time and plan ahead. Or you could carry a hundred disks in a relatively small wallet. Or, depending on where you live, you may be able to copy the DVD to a hard drive for transportation.

When kids damage the media, you are stuck purchasing another license to something you already have a license to use.

Did you use your legal right to make a backup?

But personally, I find the times I am without access to stream, a la ton a plane, in a tunnel, or just with a lot of peopel using the Internet at my house, where ever, make me want a local copy. And that means a physical copy, in general, if I want it on a device I control that doesn't need to call home or self-destruct. It also means I can resell it, loan it to a friend, etc.

Well, you could use PS/2, or serial, or even say "fuck it, no mouse for you. Here's a command line and a tab key."