http://www.amibeingtracked.com...

I just checked this. My phone is on a corporate account, so it shouldn't be eligible for the advertising program they're talking about in the first place. The cookie is gone.

I still hope they get sued out of business over this. Of course, they'll probably settle for something in the low millions that won't impact their profits.

There are other MP3 patents that don't expire this year, but their validity is in question.

And the surviving patents are, in most cases, USA only.

At least the patents on DVDs are expiring if not already expired. The first DVD player was sold in 1996, and patents can be good for up to 20 years from the filing date, so it would seem that by late next year, all necessary patents should have expired. (Patents are only 17 years from the issue date, so any patents that were actually issued at the time of the first players would have expired.)

I'm sure that they've added on patents for various RW formats, and probably for some new tricks in encoding, but that wouldn't impact playback.

MP3 patents have mostly expired, though one US patent expires later this year.

So for any application using MPEG-2 or MP3, you shouldn't be facing a big patent hurdle. If you want the lower bitrates found with newer codecs, the pain will be with us for a while to come.

If you run NAS4Free or FreeNAS, then they're based on FreeBSD.

The suggestions to run something like that are spot on. I do that with a MythTV system connected to my TV. Depending on video formats and what you get, it's getting easier to find a HDMI stick that will handle the media playback on the TV side, so all you need to hide elsewhere is a NAS.

I keep seeing spam, and it's always for sunglasses. What's the deal with that? Are people really buying sunglasses from spammers? More interestingly, if it's working for sunglasses, why am I not seeing spam for anything else?

I was just scanning the comments to see if this point had already been made. Thanks!

Perhaps the most obvious example of this was Babylon 5. In many ways that woke up television producers to the option of strong story arcs across seasons or even the entire show instead of the old rule that everything had to end back in the same state where it started. Sure, there are plenty of other examples, even before B5, but I think that is what really changed the market.

Now it's standard practice for lots of shows: 24, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and many others.

Of course, other factors now support this model that weren't really a factor with Babylon 5. Namely streaming video, DVRs, and DVDs. It's no longer a big obstacle to expect fans to not miss any episodes. Fans will stream the old episodes to catch up, record them, or buy the DVDs. In fact, the DVD market encourages strong arcs; I think people are more likely to want to own a complete story than a collection of independent episodes.

I remember doing "The Forever War" for my sci-fi book club. When we met to discuss it, we were shocked to find that we had read different versions. Depending on which printing you get, you may or may not get the depressing story in the middle. I don't believe it was ever written as separate stories, though. This was a case of an editor cutting something out, and then having it restored years later.

Just think of "Celeron" as "i1" and "Pentium" as "i2" and then they fit just fine.

I just heard a story the other day about prisons installing cell towers that only work with a small list of specific devices (owned by staff). It's a lot like using a Stingray, only being for blocking access instead of monitoring it.

Apparently keeping out unauthorized cell phones is simply too difficult.

If you only want to make calls over WiFi, then the solution already exists. Sign up for a Google Voice number, then install the Google Hangouts Dialer, and you're all set.

The potential value-add here is not the voice or texting service, but access to the WiFi network.

Why did they not support 4K?

This is the same vertical resolution as 4K, but slightly lower horizontal resolution. Why not support both 4K and double HD? It just seems silly not to try to match the resolution that movies are being produced in.

Real gamers use paper, pencils, and dice.

That's the problem with becoming dependant on a behavior that you want to prevent.

The same issue comes up with self-driving cars. What do you do about all the lost ticket revenue when you stop having traffic violations? How do police react when they lose the ability to use a traffic stop as an excuse to find drugs in cars?

How do you fund roads with a gas tax when cars become more fuel efficient and eventually switch to electricity (often generated at home with solar panels)?

Changes happen. Policies will adapt to reflect them.

Assuming this is effective, should it be added to the required list of vaccines for attending school? Imagine if it were impossible for anyone to become addicted to nicotine in the first place. The smoking rate would drop to essentially zero.

What if China required it for everyone?

This has the possibility to completely destroy the tobacco industry.

I think Google only really cares about data. Perhaps the Google-branded service will be LTE-only, including voice over LTE. If so, then they don't really care about CDMA or GSM. They may even ignore voice and tell people to use the Google Hangouts dialer with Google Voice.

That would be a pretty reasonable strategy for Google, since they're certainly going to be mostly interested in the data side of things anyway.