This comes up every time a patent gets mentioned on Slashdot. They did not patent the concept of targeting ads based on content. They patented a particular method for doing that.

Van Gogh died over a hundred years ago. The copyright has long since expired.

Only one comment and it's exactly the one I would have made. It's not to knock the technology or even complain about the price, since they're still clearly in the recovering R&D costs phase. I wouldn't mind spending a couple hundred dollars on something like this if the claims of accuracy hold up in person. But that's never going to happen if you're limiting the supply to 260 copies worldwide.

The two reasons off the top of my head where it would be acceptable not to give notice would be for emergencies or conflicts of conscience. If you find you have an illness that required immediate attention, or you have to move across country immediately to take care of a relative or are called for military service or something of that nature, then you're fine not giving two weeks notice. If you find your company is preferentially hiring on the basis or sex or hunting Man for sport, then you're fine not giving notice (might want to blow the whistle too).

If Bloomberg is for it you should pretty much just assume it's a bad idea until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt.

In general I agree with you. But there are some privacy concerns that should be addressed. The video wouldn't be able to view anything the officer couldn't have seen, but perfect permanent storage compared with imperfect memory and the ability to automate searching through footage could be troublesome. Perhaps if you needed a warrant. It should be easy to say you saw a crime at 12:43 and then get a warrant saying you can look at the footage from around 12:43.

Microsoft's Roundtable does this too. Those have been available for at least seven years.

It tries to determine when you're looking at it, and it shows the screen then instead of waiting for you to press the power button. Obviously since it can't really know when you're looking at it it guesses based on movements and touching the screen.

They don't want to own the band, they want the band to be open for everyone and to produce devices that YOU can use in that band. The difference isn't like that between two tv stations. It's more like the difference between a tv station and everyone's walkie talkies.

They wouldn't own that band anymore than Linksys owns the wifi band. Anyone with a device that obeys the band's rules could broadcast into it.

The service providers own their service. They sell what they want to sell. You are not entitled to get your way in all things. Just because someone offers services that differ from what you want doesn't mean it is okay to force them through governmental action to offer what you want. If you want a gallon of milk and Costco only sells in 2 gallon increments, do you ask congress for a bill commanding them to sell single gallons? Of course not; that would be wrong. You would buy somewhere else. The same is true of internet service. You don't like what they offer, buy somewhere else. If enough people agree with you, they will get the message, or maybe your preferences aren't the same as everyone else's. Either is fine.

I've only heard one good argument about why net neutrality should be enforced by law, and that's that there are too few options in internet service, effectively making them monopolies. That argument actually makes sense. But if that's your position, then you don't want the FCC involved, you want the FTC. Having the FTC do it is fine. It follows the common precedent that it is justified to compel fairness in the behavior of a company when there is not a real open market for its services. If the FCC does it then the precedent is very broad, that it's okay to compel a company to offer a particular set of services merely because the services deal with communications.

None of this is to say that net neutrality itself is a bad thing. I want it. I would prefer if my ISP offered it, and I would pay a modest amount for it. I also think it's a good (in the being a good citizen sense) position for the providers to take. But the government is the biggest, meanest bully on the block. If they're going to be asked to wield that considerable power to force someone to do something, you want to be damn sure it's justified, and it has to be done for the right reasons.

Samsung competes with Motorola, a side business of Android, one of Google's side businesses. Google has far bigger rivals in Microsoft's Bing and Facebook. Samsung sells a lot of phones, which is just what Google wants. It may be a version tarted up with a bunch of crapware, but it's still Android, and it's still funneling people into Google's web suite.

The reverse vampires.

To pile on, yes the GalCiv series is extremely bland. Toss Endless Space onto that pile as well. Master of Orion II holds up remarkably well. The patterns for me is that a new entry into the genre comes out, I play it a couple of times, then I reinstall MOO2 and play that for a week.

World of Tanks is pretty fun. Master of Orion is a completely different kind of game. Hope they can manage it okay. I'd love a decent sequel.