That's already been patented. You need to go deeper. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/01/157743897/can-you-get-a-patent-on-being-a-patent-troll

But if you back up your data in the cloud, your data could fall as rain anywhere in the world.

I got mine two weeks after ordering from Newell or Newark or somesuch. They did tell me 8-10 wks so maybe I just got lucky.

Don't underestimate the power of placebos, especially in intractable cases. They are not medically useless.

Dread is right. BB is one of the few shows I've watched where I'm actually afraid to find out what happens next. Not in the horror movie sense...in the trainwreck sense.

but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.

-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan,
MorganLink 3DVision Interview

We'll just store the oil and energy in the cloud. The automotive industry has been ripe for disruption for a long time.

Gaah you're right, I was mixing up SOCKS proxying with how AT&T (or was it Sprint?) was blocking some tethering apps by TTL that just bounced them through; but this is new packets so it's moot. I'm sure some kind of rate information would let them detect various protocols within SSH but I'm not too worried about that 'cause I don't use much data.

Really I just want to check my email on a device where I can actually reply to it when traveling. I have a $3/day pay-as-you-use T-Mobile contract but I've yet to try to tether with it.

If they're using browser agent detection it sounds like a blacklist rather than a whitelist.

Any idea if this could be bypassed by SSH tunneling all your computer traffic to a computer on the other side? It would still be distinguishable from traffic that originated from your phone by looking at the TTL, but I doubt many people do this.

Ditto, except MOO 1 not MOO 2 (I play it some but it's just not as good as the original).

Speaking of not as good as the original, I also still play TFTD. Tacky and unoriginal as the story may be, it has some elements I like.

BTW have you seen XComUtil? (ironically, the guy's now at BioWare): https://sites.google.com/site/stjones/xcomutil Speaking of DLC...

Also http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69341191/xenonauts/ and http://ufoai.org/wiki/index.php/News (I've played the latter, it's excellent).

How can you go about doing this? Wouldn't any backups you make by definition fall under the order? It seems like such a court order would completely shut your company down until all proceedings were over, which could be for years.

You forgot "Headless Body of Agnew" and "Richard Nixon's Disembodied Head"

Why not ask Valve nicely?

You only tell people in select states you're doing it.

Most of those have merit, but I will say:

* Sun released Java for others to use. You [read: the courts] can argue about the terms of said release, but it was released for free use on computers if not phones [as if they were different...sigh...]. If Google had developed a language called Microsoft J++ that was similar and pushed it as their alternative, you would have a point. Google uses Linux too. That's what it's there for; use.

* Altavista, yahoo, etc did classical AI methods relying heavily on human labeling. Google used what we now call modern (read: statistical) AI, and did not offer paid placement [I don't recall if Yahoo/Altavista did paid placement but it was common practice back then] To a former AI researcher you might as well say that Google is unoriginal because they and Microsoft both use computers, or that the automobile is unoriginal because horse and buggy also has wheels.

* Hotmail had 2 MB quota when Gmail came out with a gig. Google's innovation was the archive, the UI, and not having to delete mail. Also not selling your email address and personal data to external spammers, keeping all their privacy invasion inside the company and being upfront about it with an [at the time] clear, easy to read privacy policy. (I once changed my language to French on the hotmail UI and suddenly most of my spam was in French...hmmm....)

Other than that, I can see your point.