Everybody, including the people who wrote the summary are treating patents as if they were perpetual - but they are not.

AFAIK the really good patents (about the FAT-filesystem) are expiring 2015. There are still some shady non-essential FAT-patents that expire IIRC until 2017, but those are easily worked around, have tons of prior art, are about non-essential features and/or are laughably frivolous.

So of course a patent-portfolio purchased in 2011 may be worth a lot less today. It may be even worthless, depending on what patents have expired. Basically the worth of a patent portfolio can be calculated by how much money could be milked so far (by royalties or monopoly pricing) from it multiplied by the time still left until expiration. So most patent portfolios will lose value over time (although there may be rare exceptions when some revolutionary products come out - but that did not happen since 2011).

People, do you remember the gif-pdf patent outrcry? It's ancient history now - and all these patents will be history in just a few years because most of them were filed in the 1990s.

That is the result of progressive education and a lowering of all standards for inclusivity.

BGP at "tiny" is even better than WebP at "small" - pretty impressive.

GIF is still superior for many use-cases, like small pictures with just a handful of colors. And it's not just a small difference, PNG takes several times the space than GIF in that area. (Yes, there are also use-cases where PNG is better - but PNG is not a replacement for GIF everywhere)

Exactly. And because a Javascript implementation is available it works right now on every browser.

I agree with you about MP3/Ogg - but the Javascript decoder (used for example in http://bellard.org/bpg/gallery...) could make all the difference.

Basically it means that the server admin can reap the benefits (bandwidth) while the user has to handle the legacy conversion (Javascript runs on the user's machine). Therefore there is practically no downside for those who decide what is on a webpage.

And once this format is even just semi-widespread, browsers will start to support it too - and then it's a standard.

Exactly. It is the nearest and therefore most accessible large Kuiper belt objects. Sure there are others and bigger ones, but they are somewhat more distant.

That's an understatement: That's where we have all good pictures of Uranus. From Earth, Uranus is a tiny blob.

Exactly. That article was really - what's that buzzword called - oh yeah: anticlimactic

Yeah, check it out:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/site...

We have here everything

- multiple layers on a supposed "scan"
- strange shadows
- strange mixing of color and b/w parts

Good enough for the American public, so it seems.

I've checked out the birth-certificate directly from whitehouse.gov - and it's also obviously fake. - And it doesn't matter that it's obviously fake, nobody who matters in the US cares. And those who care are just insulted as racists.

Of course that doesn't establish that he was born in Kenya (unlikely), but there must be a reason why they faked it...

With several thousand soldiers usually having nothing better to do (and also having the order to) watch the front - on both sides - that is ample time to take a picture.

And in fact it is also ample time to have some paper trail in the chain of command - again on both sides. Because a large missile starting will get reported when it happens near the front.

Smoke trail or not, the complete absence of any reports of a rocket starting is indeed evidence that indeed no rocket started there.

You must have been sleeping for the last 20 years, because that is exactly what I've heard numerous times in the 90s.

Then Linux started to dominate webservers. (late 90s)
Then Linux started to dominate supercomputers. (early 00s)
Then Linux started to dominate embedded systems. (mid 00s)
Then Linux started to dominate cellphones. (early 10s)
Now Linux is starting to dominate tablets.

Yes, Linux is not (yet) dominating desktops - but even without the desktop, the number of markets Linux dominates right now is pretty impressive. That's not hobbyist.

Lately, OpenGL got a lot of performance improvements, so (hopefully) that situation will improve.

The media, the politics - the whole power-structure just loves these self-hating sick social justice warriors. They ARE the status quo.