You're definitely correct that nuclear isn't renewable. But we have enough known, accessibly Uranium to last 10,000 years at current rates of consumption. And that isn't even factoring in the Thorium. So, hopefully that 10,000 years will give us enough time to find a better energy source which we can use or at least enough energy to build a shitload of solar panels.

Yeah, I read my license agreement for my Samsung TV and was content with it, too. It wasn't actually technically that short because it included the GPL and the BSD license, but the parts other than that were quite short and reasonable.

Thanks for returning your Sony based on a bad EULA. If more people returned TVs because of unacceptable EULAs, the TV makers would cut that shit out.

I predict that this will be like Coupon the Movie all over again.

I double-checked things after I wrote this, and I'm wrong. I didn't realize that Shor's algorithm could be used to solve discrete logarithm problems. So, the ECC versions of things are not affected, but the integer versions of El Gamal and Diffe-Hellman are.

You should keep in mind that although theoretically there may be efficient quantum algorithms for a variety of problems on which cryptographic schemes are based, in practice, the only one which has been found is factoring. So, yeah, RSA will become toast if we can get the number of qubits in a quantum computer up into the neighborhood of RSA key lengths (1024, 2048, 4096). But, exceedingly few of the other major cryptographic systems rely on factoring being hard. So, for example, Diffe-Hellman or El Gamal (both integer and elliptic curve versions for both) will probably not be appreciably easier to crack. So, there doesn't seem to be any serious reason to be worried about public key cryptography, just RSA. So changes to SSH are pretty straight-forward.

As for why people aren't worrying about it, my guess would be that most people don't follow quantum computing, and the few which do may have reason to wonder if we will ever actually reach the 1024 qubit size in a functioning quantum computer. A few years ago, I would've told people not to worry about it because I was following the state of the art and it was around 5 qubits and research had shown that under current models, you needed 9 qubits of output to reliably output 1 normal bit (if my memory is correct). So, we weren't even one 0.1% of the way to cracking RSA. These days, the number of qubits is higher, but it's still not clear how long it will be until we can actually functionally factor a 1024 bit number.

As someone who's written code in a lot of different languages, I find that writing correct code in a type-inferring statically-typed functional language requires maybe a tiny bit more thinking than it does in a procedural language or a dynamically typed functional language. But it still requires less thinking than debugging non-obvious problems in procedural code. Debugging statically-typed functional language code is a little less thinky because functions are better localized and also, because debugging is a lot less common, I just don't wind up spending the same amount of total time thinking about it.

On the other hand, writing slapdash "it probably works, I think" code in procedural languages is much less thinky than in type-inferring statically-typed functional languages, but I'm not convinced that that's a good thing.

I've written projects in Logo, BASIC, Pascal, Prolog, C, C++, Fortran, HyperTalk, SML, Common Lisp, Java, Perl, Ocaml, Python, Actionscript, and Javascript. Out of all of these, I strongly prefer Ocaml and if I'm choosing my own language will use it for pretty well any project. I make that choice because I find that it minimizes the total time that it takes me to write, test, and debug the code to get to the point where the project has no bugs which are relevant to me and that I can feel assured that it is logically correct. This standard may not produce the same preference for all coders as not all coders are equal. However, I believe that the biggest reason that many programmers don't make this same choice is that they haven't actually learned a language like Ocaml or Haskell and developed projects in it. It's easy enough to say "Well, it's too complex", but until you actually try it out on a serious project and get some experience with it, it's tough to really evaluate a language.

I don't know about anyone else, but now that it exists and seems stable, my next web project is going to be written in Ocaml using Ocsigen and js_of_ocaml. My code is way more likely to be correct, that way.

Most people didn't really think in either way before they learned to program. Most people are terrible at writing intricate and correct lists of instructions. Learning to program required learning to think imperatively: to communicate exact instructions rather than just intent.

In some places, they've taught functional programming languages first. Students don't seem to have found it any harder to start with functional programming languages than imperative. What is hard is shifting paradigms. Programmers who have mostly written in imperative languages find it hard to switch to functional languages, but the opposite is true as well.

This appears to be the same list as from the Caribou Coffee case (brief). So far, I've read through three of them. I read the first one: '559, one which didn't fit the same pattern: '646, and the oldest: '397.

'559 is one of the patents which they are asserting that business are definitely violating because they're using WiFi. If you read the text of this patent, there are a large number of diagrams and descriptions of a very specific wireless sensor network system, which may, in fact, be novel. However, when you read the claims, they're sufficiently broadly written that they cover almost any wireless network. So on its face, it might look like they have a case. Except that this patent was filed in 2001. That was way, way after 802.11 was codified and consumer products using the patented techniques were already on the market. It's even written so broadly that it would cover AlohaNet, which went into operation in 1971. As such, prior art for this patent is obvious and it should be invalidated.

A large number of the patents in their suing portfolio would seem to match the same profile as '559 since in the lawsuits they're specifically claiming that they know for sure that the businesses are violating them despite not even knowing which particular type of access point those businesses are using. Many of the patents in the lawsuit are more recent than '559 and the plaintiffs are effectively claiming that they cover all WiFi devices. Any such patent should clearly be invalidated based on prior art.

There are also a few which they only claim that discovery will allow them find is being violated. I read one of the newer ones, '646, and the oldest one, '397.

By contrast to '559, the oldest patent: '397 is less clearly invalid. Filed in 1994, it's a patent for a wireless access point which uses two radios to ensure higher reliability. The claims leave out any specific requirement of the purpose of the second radio and so just cover any wireless access point with two radios. They're hoping that their discovery will show that some of the access points in use have two radios. Although it's quite possible that prior art exists (and likely, I would guess), it's not so easy and obvious that it shows up in a simple Google search. But someone more familiar with the history of WLAN devices may well be able to identify a dual-radio device from before 1994. Even if no such device exists, the novelty of the invention seems to be its primary weakness. Given that devices with one radio existed and that certain people were already using two radios for redundancy by using two different devices, is it really that novel to just include two radios in one device? If it were my choice, I would rule it obvious. But both courts and the patent office have been very reluctant to overturn patents based on lack of novelty. So I suspect that this one will hinge on whether or not they can find prior art.

The last patent I read, '646 is a newer patent that they also claim that discovery will show whether or not the defendants are violating it. It's a newer patent, but unlike the other one doesn't cover WiFi in general. It has a huge number of claims (270), but all of them are based on claims 1, 15, 87, 144, 145, 216, so reading those doesn't take too long. They all claim a system in which wireless node go into sleep mode and the periodically wake up to check to see if there are pending messages for them. This, very simply, is not how WiFi works. It clearly is not applicable to any existing WiFi devices. I haven't looked into the prior art situation because it's clear that the defendants aren't violating the patent.

So, from a survey of three of the claimed patents, my guess is that they're trying a "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks approach". The plaintiffs clearly don't understand all of their own patents or they would've left '559 and '646 out entirely because they have no chance on winning with those patents (unless they can find someone the courts accept as a technical expert and who has such a poor understanding of WiFi and/or patent '646 that he'll claim that it applies). On the overall, I'll be curious to see how this actually turns out, but it's obvious that, on their face, many of the plaintiffs claims are untrue.

Well, quoting from the article:

Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."

So, given floating platform with loose building codes, I think that the hurricane plan is probably disintegration. This may also be the tropical storm plan, the nor'easter plan, the water spout plan, and the heavy rain plan. Of course, if they're lucky, that'll just be the buildings and not the platform itself.

Exactly! We need countries with stronger property rights. For example, did you know that in many countries you can't legally own people? The ability to buy and sell your fellow man is the traditional bedrock of most successful societies. Once unfettered from such silly, non-traditional restrictions, capitalists will have free reign to create a magnificent society the likes of which we have not seen since ancient Greece.

We all know that Rapture didn't float. You're thinking of the setting from the game after Bioshock Infinite.

That's pretty well every software patent ever.

Having read the patent (RE40,092 in case anyone is interested), it's claims are so broad and complete that any implementation of any kind of acceleration of the booting process would violate it. In fact, they're so complete, that any hibernate mode would also likely violate them, which suggests that it shouldn't be hard to find prior art since hibernate modes substantially predate this patent. I suspect that Apple will use prior art to get the patent invalidated, but it's tough to say for sure.

The real problem with this patent, though, is the standard one for software patents: it's just a set of general ideas about what you could do to make booting faster (store configuration data, check configuration data, write some or all pages of memory to disk, read some or all pages of memory from disk) with nothing that could actually be described as a specific invention or process. As such, the patent (as is almost always the case with software patents) is so broad that it's ridiculous. They've basically been granted a patent on any feasible idea for speeding up the boot process.

The patent isn't really very innovative. Most of what's covered in the first patent is simply the exact same control scheme available on CD players at that time (skip forward, back, change the order of tracks) except with digital audio files on a computer. I don't know if it should fail for prior art, but it should definitely fail for obviousness. Even worse is the fact that they're not really patenting a particular invention, they're patenting the very idea of skipping forwards and backwards in a list of audio tracks on a computer. Ideas don't deserve patent protection and aren't really particularly clever. If they had some specific mechanism, then there might be something clever there, but they don't.

This is the real problem with software patents as embodied in the US patent system: they're patents on ideas rather than particular inventions or processes. If you invented a new more efficient process for turning carbon and iron into steel, you couldn't simply claim "a process for turning carbon and iron into steel" and then be able to sue anyone else who made steel. You would instead have to patent the details of how you turned carbon and iron into steel and then sue other people who used the same process. But they've patented the very idea of skipping forward and backwards in a downloadable playlist. They don't patent storing the playlist in a doubly linked list and then using that to navigate or storing it in an array and using a second indirect array to reorder things or anything specific like that. If they did, that would be an invention or process. The total lack of implementation detail in the patent means that it should be rejected on its face because it's not an invention or process and hence, not patentable.