you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

It's very common these days for companies to allow universities to use their technology at the cost of tying the company into the university's patent revenue. And of course this is often publicly-funded research, so not only is the taxpayer paying for the development of patents used to sue that same taxpayer, the patents go directly to a company from academia.

The net effect is to feed intellectual property centered companies at the expense of the technology sector in general and small technology companies in particular.

yeah, and it's probably carcinogenic.

I've got a nasty Diet Cola habit, but switched from Pepsi to Sam's after Pepsi started adding ace-K. It's not hard to calculate a dose of aspartame that your liver enyzmes can handle but there's no safe-ish dose of ace-K.

Oh, and the whole "aspartame makes you fat" meme is bullshit - I've dropped 45 lbs in the past year by getting rid of nearly all the carbs in my diet, all while drinking the stuff. An over-abundance of carbs is what horks your insulin system.

A sweetener that is proven to be incredibly dangerous, though: sugar, especially HFCS. It causes the largest health crisis the country has ever seen and innumerable downstream morbidities. Most articles about artificial sweeteners tend to "gloss over" that part.

A huge number of Americans self-medicate on caffeine (the drug they should be on is probably illegal or guarded behind the nearly impenetrable veil of the AMA's psychiatric guild). But encouraging them to drink their caffeine with sugar is the worst possible idea. Ace-K is probably carcinogenic, but once you've got some cancer cells, to really make them happy, fill them with fructose - Pepsi's got what cancer craves!

At what point did Pandora explicitly ask the artists if they wanted their work advertising? At which point did the artists explicitly agree to Pandora advertising their works?

Pandora is just radio "on the Internet", with the logical efficiencies that unicast delivery can provide. Demanding a different licensing scheme is as much bullshit as every one of the patents that demanded rent for some existing thing and then added "on the Internet" on the end.

It's only lawyers who benefit from re-litigating established societal norms. Of course, they promise some middlemen riches to get them to file actions, but there's only one party that's guaranteed any riches.

This. I don't give a damn about animations or not animations, but what I do give a damn about is when I load G+ and I can't even start typing what I want to type for 15 seconds while the UI gets its shit together and loads all its assets from all kinds of Google domains and re-arranges its layout on-the-fly.

Same reason I don't 'like' YouTube comments anymore - it's at least a 10 second pain while it opens new browser windows, redirects to G+, bounces back, and occasionally works round-trip.

I really don't think that Google is this stupid - engineering principles can fix all of these problems. These must be features that somebody wanted to rot on the vine and incentivized their developers and users accordingly.

I use a few non-search Google products, but the way they seem to trip over 98% of them makes me never want to rely on any of them.

If Google can't even make Lollipop work on its own hardware, how much of an endorsement is that for other manufacturers to put their efforts into Android? Clearly it's not because Google is underfunded.

I'm not jumping to conclusions, but the people who have been making the case for historical alien visitors claim that the written record specifies liquid mercury rotating at high speeds as part of their antigrav drives. The Mayan writings are the most-often cited.

I'm poised to install a $4K backup generator in the next few months. I don't live in a region where I can force my neighbors to pay for my tech goodies, and the $9K difference doesn't get paid for on any kind of time horizon that outpaces even a basic interest rate.

The generator also has a near-infinite runtime, in the case of a bad storm. However, it needs more maintenance, so if there were price-parity I might opt for the battery.

Give it another five years and that just might be feasible - good for Musk for getting this ball rolling, and kudos to the early adopters who take it in the pocket to promote the technology.

If slashcode had ever evolved beyond 2001, we'd be selecting comments like this to replace the summary.

And even with the 'cannon' in China, do we know who lit the fuse?

Almost certainly the same people who arranged for NXDOMAIN on github.com a few weeks back. They really hate that there are open source anti-censorship tools on there.

They had to stop breaking DNS for github since most of China's Internet developers couldn't get any work done anymore.

That Chinese developers are freely using a California hosting service which has benefits to everybody in the world, and everybody recognizes that the "damage" here is government, it actually gives me a bit of hope. People do prefer to cooperate on all things, until a few sociopaths get a set of keys.

Is this a Bayer or Shell astroturfer here to spread disinfo?