I always found PostgresQL harder to admin. It needs to be VACUUM'ed periodically. How often? The poor admin is supposed to figure that out themselves. Oh, and don't try to actually use the database during a VACUUM. Even after the autovacuum feature was added, it never seemed to work right, and my databases still needed to be vacuumed by hand, sometimes taking more than a day to run. Even with frequent vacuuming, indexes can get bloated -- I would see indexes with more pages allocated than entries, which needed to be manually reindexed. Worse, you need to tell postgres how much memory to allocate for vacuum'ing, and if you don't get it right, it 'leaks' disk space. None of these sorts of things have ever been a problem for MySQL.

There are many things which are not "being obvious to someone skilled in the field" but which are easy and cheap to duplicate once the original invention has been made and published.

That may be true, but consider that Lodsys hasn't made anything, and I guarantee you the Rovio developers hadn't read the patent before they wrote their games.

Sure about that? Confident that the Overdrive folks didn't hide some watermark of some kind into it? You better be sure, because the evidence is sitting on Amazon's servers...

I couldn't tell you if it is illegal or unethical, but emailing the DRM-stripped files to an amazon-hosted email server seems ... ill-advised.

JDK is so not GPL.

I am so not a lawyer, but TFA claims the basis for the case is a Minnesota state statute, but the case was argued in federal court. How does that work?

If this doesn't stop cell phone theft, nothing will.

What you are describing is basically the situation faced by every conference with more than a few hundred people. Everything is fine when you are in break-out rooms or smaller sessions, but put everyone together in a ballroom, add a boring keynote speaker (probability: high), and wireless becomes unusable. Especially geek conferences when every person in the room has a laptop and a iPhone. Or two. The usual solution is large numbers of WAPs and let the proles self-regulate which WAP they connect to: if they can't get one one, they'll try, try again until the connect.

This reminds me of an episode of Simpsons, where someone asks Homer something like "do you imagine what would be a world without lawyers?", and he starts imagine a green, sunny field, with everyone singing, dancing and very happy. :-)

Thank you for this post. This guy's been making the rounds again, and everytime he's been shown to be a borderline nut and a chronic patent applyer. Getting a patent is simply a matter of money, not ability, talent, or creativity. Apple has patents on sliding your finger across a touch screen and Amazon has its infamous one-click patent. Companies like Tivo find it more profitable to sue over patents than to actually sell a product.

This guy represents nothing but the lax process of getting a patent mixed in with some medical quackery.

The consent degree did not apply to Lucent after it was spun off, and they did even worse. Moreover, lack of commercialization was true at _all_ the privately run labs. How much did Xerox make from PARC's great Computer Science work? IBM from T.J Watson?

It's incredible how successful other companies were at commercializing the amazing basic discoveries or inventions that came out of Bell Labs (transistor, laser, Unix, etc. etc. etc.), and somehow AT&T never was all that successful at commercializing these discoveries, and ended up spinning off Bell Labs and selling out to SBC.

Bell Labs held many, many patents from all this basic research, that ultimately weren't nearly as profitable as the inventions that used them. Lessons for those who insist that IP rights are key to innovation.

The Airbus A-380 gets roughly 100 passenger-miles per gallon, cruising substantially faster and further. Surely with only enough fuel for a short 100 mile flight, no cargo, you could cram twice as many people in it, and easily get your 200 passenger-miles per gallon. Of course, chartering one, might cost more than the prize is worth...

If Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer is wearing a red shirt, he's probably in trouble by now.

Michael Jackson, great guy, wrote books about beer, died a couple of years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(writer)