I have to say as a complete layman that I find this whole discussion fascinating. I had no idea there was such a wide variety of eyes in this world.

Which makes me wonder though why we haven't actually been seeing any/many inventions making use of these principles to augment our own vision. For example, I can see that a physical analog for the goat's vision may have some application in the field of law enforcement, or vehicle HUDs or anything for that matter where a larger field of vision would be an advantage.

So, their solution to a badly drafted, overly broad and ridiculously vague piece of legislation is... more legislation? And further, each state wants to introduce its own flavour of law into the picture?

What a nightmare. Instead of having to deal with one bad piece of federal legislation, you now have 1 federal and potentially 50 state laws to worry about. The only ones rubbing their hands in glee are patent lawyers.

The only real solution is patent reform, and the stalling members of the Senate ought to lose their jobs.

One of the main sticking points for members so far has been a proposal to make it easier for the losing party in a meritless patent lawsuit to pay the winner’s court fees.

*rolls eyes*

In the meantime, the rest of the country has to deal with the consequences.

6092 patent lawsuits were filed in 2013, a 12.4% increase over 2012.
Of the top ten filers of patent lawsuits in 2013, every single one was a patent troll.
The most litigious patent owner was notorious troll ArrivalStar, which filed 137 lawsuits.
Patent cases clustered in a handful of federal district courts, with 1495 filed in the Eastern District of Texas and 1336 in the District of Delaware (including 900 before a single Eastern District of Texas judge).

It is however a strong indication of misplacement of priorities.

If you overspend on great marketing but produce a turd of a game, it will still fail. Case in point- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game).

OTOH if you produce a great game but spend minimally on marketing, it can still succeed through word of mouth, etc. Case in point- Minecraft.

On January 12, 2011, Minecraft passed 1 million purchases, less than a month after entering its beta phase. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic.

I rather doubt that any game falling into the category of "greatest game ever" or even a great game will fail without paid marketing so long as its accessible to players. Gamers tend to be quite vocal in sharing about games they're in love with.

You mean like the use of tabs and separators in diaries?

Oddly enough, as I am reading this I look at the top of my browser and -lo and behold- I see tabs. Which work very well in flipping between the various web pages I have open.

1) If your ISP advertises X Mbps, and the ISP makes a deal with Netflix to put in a separate exclusive pipe that provides enough total bandwidth to keep up with demand, and you still get X Mbps to everything else, then I don't know that I have a problem with it.

You subscribe and pay to both your ISP and Netflix. You've therefore already paid your ISP to carry your bits from Netflix.
Your ISP makes a deal with Netflix, and they get money from Netflix.
Netflix raises its prices to pay your ISP.
You pay more to Netflix.

Netflix raises its price by £1 in the UK, €1 in Europe and $1 in the US

Your ISP is getting more money from you indirectly through Netflix.

I am convinced that the price per channel would go up if everyone was able to purchase channels a la carte. It costs $X to produce all the content, and they need to charge each customer more than $Y (where y = x / number of customers) on average in order to make a profit.

Likely so, but even then the cost of paying for just that one channel that you do want to watch will likely be substantially lower than the package that you now pay for which includes all the other crap channels you do not want to watch.

Imagine if there's this shirt that you want to buy, but its only sold in a package for $200 with 4 other shirts sized XXXL which you will never wear. Does it even make sense to buy the bundle?

The channels you want would have to be much, much more highly priced than you think in an a la carte system.

Higher than what the content providers get from the cable providers, but still less than what you pay for the cable package. Which seems like a pretty decent deal.

Content providers like the WWE are already rolling out their own internet offerings. Other content providers are known to be considering the same.

What is surprising is that the WWE’s new channel isn’t coming to cable. The company has announced that it’s developing a new round-the-clock streaming network that will be available on smartphones, tablets and Internet-ready devices like Roku boxes and video game consoles. The new channel will offer all of the league’s pay-per-view specials live, along with original programming, archival footage of classic matches and pre- and postgame shows for Raw and Smackdown. In total there will be 1,500 hours of video on demand at launch. The channel will cost $9.99 per month and debuts on Feb. 24.

And yes, its rolling out for prices that their fans would jump for. $9.99 is well within OP's budget of $20.

You all clamored for a tightly-corperate-coupled government to control the internet.

Then it happened, the FCC decided it could do what it wanted.So now instead of back-end interconnects being negotiated between an ISP and a content provider as had been the case, the government by fiat has declared the "winner" - the ISP.

Don't be obtuse. The government should have, but failed to, control the internet. That is why the ISPs are charging you and arm and a leg. One example- the FCC wanted net neutrality, which by all accounts most consumers want. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the ISPs however killed the idea :-

Any semblance of net neutrality in the United States is as good as dead. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Tuesday struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s 2010 order that imposed network neutrality regulations on wireline broadband services. The ruling is a major victory for telecom and cable companies who have fought all net neutrality restrictions vociferously for years.

You are doing the ISPs work for them. Every time one of you should "less gov'mt" and burn flags, they rub their hands in glee. Less government = more freedom in them deciding how to skin you.

Also explain to me how is it that you can get cheaper broadband in countries even heavier regulated than the US .

Stop right there. You know that will never happen because their lobbyists be will hard at work making sure that your elected representatives will kill any such plan in birth. Probably on the grounds of "less government", "capitalism" and "free competition".

Lets have more realistic solutions, please.

Say I told Comcast to fuck off. They'd cut me off. Sure, short-term revenues would go down because I lost all those customers. Long-term, though, I would win because those customers would not remain silent. I would let everyone know that I am quite willing to give them access, but it is their cable company that is blocking the service. Cut off from a service they want by an ill-behaving monopoly, they would kick up a fuss and - doubtless unwillingly - the politicos would have to regulate properly or they would lose their seats.

I'm sorry, I don't have your faith in "the people".

Case in point- US consumers have been paying through their nose for broadband access for years.

Home broadband in the US costs far more than elsewhere. At high speeds, it costs nearly three times as much as in the UK and France, and more than five times as much as in South Korea.

I don't see this rising tide of angry consumers you speak of. Most of them will shrug their shoulders and keep on paying. With Netflix cut off, they will just switch to cable.

Netflix does offer something similar to ISPs so they don't need to route all that traffic over the backbones, but since Netflix charges a fee to maintain the cache system, ISPs don't want it.

Untrue. The CDNs are provided by Netflix for free.

ISPs can directly connect their networks to Open Connect for free. ISPs can do this either by free peering with us at common Internet exchanges, or can save even more transit costs by putting our free storage appliances in or near their network.

The ISPs are refusing because many of them also operate cable companies/online services *cough*Hulu*cough* that compete with Netflix.

Common sense dictates that *if* you value your money in the slightest, you alone have access and control. Short of this, you've lost the battle before it has begun.

Do you use bank services? Credit cards? Money transfer services? Paypal? Square? Bitcoins?

Ok maybe your argument is that data and money is not the same. Lets restrict the argument to data alone. A policeman asks you for your driving licence. Your bank asks you for your transaction number. The online vendor you are trying to buy goods from asks for your credit card number. Are you going to refuse?

It is not remotely possible to make sure that "you alone have access and control" to your own data. At some point, you will have to share it with someone else, and therefore run the risk it may be exposed.

Those people stupid enough to put important data on other people's servers, where the have no control over who sees them and now, after being warned time and time again that this very thing is inevitable, will find themselves devoid of a bank account eventually. At that point, they will:

1) Learn their lesson the hard way.

Calling them stupid is not fair, I think. A majority of the older generation, especially those in their 60s or 70s are only just dipping their toes into using things like smartphones, iPads, emails, a little Facebook, Skype and maybe services like Dbox or Box to "keep their pictures". They did not grow up being exposed to personal computers or smart devices. They also grew up in a time when it was more common to trust authority figures. So now, they are bombarded by ads etc from M$, Apple and Google saying their services are safe- why would they not trust them?

Your comment about "being warned time and time again that this very thing is inevitable" is specious. Certainly, if you are a techie or geek, you would see and take note of these warnings form the tech sites that you visit. The average Joe would not see it, and even if he did would not understand.

You speak as someone who never had to guide an older family member/relative in how to use smart devices.

I LIKE this idea. Catch the slow and the stupid so that I might drain them of their own precious bodily fluids so that I might prolong my own life.

You do realise that the rich and powerful can easily pay the fast and the strong to catch you so that they can drain your precious bodily fluids so that they can prolong their own lives. Still like the idea?

Look I broadly agree with you that Google today is no longer as good as they used to be, both in terms of their product and their "don't be evil" mentality/mantra/outlook.

But really, dissing their employees is a new low. Most of them have no say in the decision making process and are just working to make a living, like the rest of us.

And I had a look at your posting history. Do you realise that 9 out of your last 10 posts are nothing more than variations of "F*** Google"? And all in this same thread?

Tone it down a bit, chump. You are starting to look like a "Scroogled" fanboy.