Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

Can you imagine what he'll be like at 18? Or 28?

An open invitation to extrapolate? Whoa daddy that. Fasten your air-bags, ladies and gentlemen.

Will the clever little rug rat grow up to become the William James of maker-space or William James Sidis of faker-disgrace?

From a business perspective, this move makes perfect sense. From an educated geek end-user's perspective, it really sucks. But what are you going to do?

First of all, I'm not going to purchase any of those fancy apps. I'm going to use my smart phone as for phone calls, photographs, maps, and web browsing. While it's truly a waste of a beautiful technology, it's merely inconvenient not to bother with all those invasive programs.

I consider the new security model worse than not having the apps at all.

I would opt out immediately. This is an immensely devious way to get other people to pay for a large WiFi buildout. I guess that there is no low that the telecom industry will stoop to in the name of a buck.

The Roman Emperor that converted to Christianity after being 'saved' is the real power behind Christianity...

Are you sure? I suspect the power behind the throne was really Helena, Constantine's mother. Or maybe Fausta.

In July, Constantine had his wife, the Empress Fausta, killed at the behest of his mother, Helena. Fausta was left to die in an over-heated bath. Their names were wiped from the face of many inscriptions, references to their lives in the literary record were erased, and the memory of both was condemned.

The record is unfortunately thin on which influencer wielded more power on gullible Constantine, but clearly Helena prevailed in this particular deed.

Consider also Aunt Jemima. She was a nobody—if she even existed—before some marketing genius slapped her mug on a bottle. If future archaeologists someday put together a landfill page rank, she'll be waaay up there.

Everyone will need to raise their pension ages and raise their taxes/cut spending.

Alternatively, we could roll back our immense gains in life-expectancy. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

The problem seems to be that human nature is willing to work very hard for $20 (if that pays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) or for a $20 million xmas bonus (if that's your second vacation home) but we're all pretty slack-assed when motivated by any sum in between.

These people would do as well to stand on a soap box on a public street corner to engage in gifted oration, then hand out leaflets to the crowd suggesting that people express their support and appreciation by signing up for a no-cost-to-your-pocket-book alcohol tolerance study at the local university (to more precisely characterize the vomit threshold for the advancement of medical science) , for which the orator himself receives a small referral fee.

Advertising, much like alcohol, is hardly known as a tonic to clarity of mind. I'll pass, thank you very much. I've far in extreme of the Mormons on the issue of what passes into my brain through my eye sockets. Alcohol only makes me vulnerable to the lizard housed within (he's not so bad, really, once you stare him down). Advertising, on the other hand, exposes me to spitting cobra exotoxins. The dead giveaway is the spinning iris of seduction: animated GIFs, Flash-based logo rotations, pop-ups, pop-overs, all resembling nothing so much as a vulture with the twitching tail of a live and highly agitated squirrel shit to the ischium out of the vulture's ass.

Shall I welcome this bubonic creature to peck at my eyeballs from the side of my screen? Even for "Four score and twenty" or "I have a dream"?

Nah. I don't think so. Not unless I've got a bag full of Shuriken ice picks and it's somebody else's HD monitor.

I think the better (and more common way) is to simply boot into Windows to play your games.

If I only had to boot into Windows in order to run my games (of which I have none, because of what comes after "only") then I would surely do so. What I'm not willing to do is boot into the Windows EULA and revenue collection racket—please inform me on how to do one without the other if you know how—after its ape-like thumb collapsed the trachea on any vestige of consumer choice worthy of so much as a solitary big whoop.

If Ambrose Bierce had an entry in his Devil's Dictionary for the word "simplicity" (he doesn't, I actually looked) he would most likely have defined it as "expediting gratification by paying more to receive less" or some scalding variation upon that theme at the expense your precise invocation, and many more besides.

This could all be fixed by issuing the original patent provisionally, and mandating a second, more thorough review by the patent office when the decorative sabre is first unsheathed.

Maybe the target of the action files an application for second-stage examination and ponies up a small fee on the order of $1000, then the patent office adds the patent to their public "notice of re-examination" board for sixty days to solicit any other public input. After the examination, the target recovers from the patent holder $250 for every claim shot down and another $5000 if the entire patent falls (the patent infringement action could permit the patent holder to exercise only certain claims, so as not to place themselves on the hook for the claim-reversal penalty award on every frivolous claim, but they still owe the $5000 penalty award if claims associated with the infringement action is reduced to the empty set).

Second-stage ratification doesn't need to be a big thing. It only needs to be as big as what the first-stage examination was originally presupposed to accomplish when this whole system was first set up, back when it was possible for a patent examiner to have his or her finger on the pulse of innovation to any extent at all, before human knowledge blue-shifted by a further six orders of magnitude.

To a first approximation, given enough eyeballs, all claims are hollow.

What we really need is a mechanical turk to challenge claims of novel art and claims of application (which should be separated). If the patent holder wished to instigate second-phase examination without filing against an adversary (so as to increase their litigational certitude before uncasking their powder), they would need to post $10,000 as a bounty fund. The public would be invited to submit arguments against any particular claim (much like a bug-tracking system). Maybe there's a $5 fee per hundred words (minimum $5) for each argument filed. The first argument (by filing time) to unseat a claim is awarded a $250 refutation bounty from the bounty fund.

Even better, people are allowed to pay $5 to click "me too". All the "me too" payments are funnelled to the person who originally filed the item (small profit, same day). All parties split the bounty (including the item owner) if that item scores (the incentive to be the fiftieth person to click "me too" is not attractive; by interpolation, the "me too" button functions as a prediction market).

I think we just need to bring a mechanical turk free market processes to bear on the patent approval system, and abuses would soon be dramatically scaled back.

If a company just wants to accumulate patents it could potentially waggle, nothing changes, and all the same press releases can still be penned (mentions of patents pursued would mean less, now being more frail in the waggling, but this is the usual erosion of sense anyone shrewd has long observed).

Social media will quickly be your company's undoing as no one will want to live in place where they are forced to pay for a crippled internet as a condition of living in one of your properties. There will quickly be expensive lawsuits essentially forcing your company to decouple your internet service from the rent and making it optional. I would simply waggle my middle finger at your company and find a different place to live.

The causes of obesity are a multitude of factors. This article makes an overly simplistic suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight. As someone that has lost over a hundred pounds, I'll tell you this: it is making good food choices, counting calories, and getting physical activity. Certainly adequate rest is helpful but there is no credible study to suggest that someone that is doing these things yet doesn't get enough sleep is obese.

I've been parsing this kind of press release for a long, long time now. I can pretty much tell what we're dealing with by how hard it is to state the advantage of a new approach in narrow and precise language.

That this blurb doesn't even disclose the error model class (error correction is undefined without doing so) suggests that the main advantage of this codec lies more in the targeting of a particular loss model than a general advance in mathematical power.

Any error correction method looks good when fed data that exactly corresponds to the loss model over which it directly optimises.

The innovators of this might have something valuable, but they are clearly trying to construe it as more than it is. This suggests that there are other, equally viable ways to skin this particular cat.

Hmmm, I saw that in a movie once. Wonder how much the air will cost?

Snowden is going to be the first person in human history to have a suspicious death at the age of one-hundred and five.

There's a big difference between what these agencies do under cover of darkness, and what they do under the glare of a public spotlight. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after two decades in exile, whereupon he continued to criticise his homeland for another fourteen years, before dying of heart failure under suspicious circumstances at age eighty-nine.

There's a good reason they get mighty twisted about having their darkness aired: no more summary judgement, no more page 13 obituaries of A-list adversaries.

Hurricane Lolita:

I once read of an interview given by Roman Polanski in which he described listening to a lurid radio account of his offense even as he was fleeing to the airport. He suddenly realized the trouble he was in, he said, when he came to appreciate that he had done something for which a lot of people would furiously envy him.

No, Snowden's exile is something different: a life not envied, not one little bit. That much his button-down steampunk adversaries can manage under the broad light of day.