This article explains it more clearly, the author at Discovery is confused.
http://www.businessinsider.com...

For sure the hydrogen and oxygen are much older than the sun, but are the water molecules older than the sun? The formation of the sun may have caused the creation of a lot of new water molecules out of the ancient elements. Or did the water molecules form in interstellar space before the sun's birth?

The left-right axis is orthogonal to the authoritarian-libertarian axis. There are as many right-wing authoritarians as left wing authoritarians, as many left wing libertarians as right wing libertarians.

The actual libertarians call themselves either anarchists or communists. The 'libertarians' in the US are conservatives. They believe in laws such as property laws which protect the rich against the poor, but no laws which protect the poor against the rich.

"As much as 70% of Internet-distributed data is now video, 50% of it from Netflix. This new video industry — growing exponentially and transforming the nature of entertainment — is getting a free ride on the cable and telco investment in broadband. Arguably, this is unsustainable free distribution, overtaxing networks and slowing the Internet for everyone."

I just gag on "free ride". 11M Netflix subscribers pay Verizon/Comcast/etc $50 * 12 * 11m = $6.6 billion a year for this "free" ride. Margins on Internet services at Verizon/Comcast are believe to be in the 90% profit range.

I can help the FCC solve this. Require that ISPs provide at least one settlement free peering point for each customer in their network with no peering point providing access to less that 10,000 customers. 10K because after all they are ISPs and they should do something for that $50/mth (i'm sure Verizon would immediately declare this settlement free peering point to be the customer's wifi node without this rule).

Private key and public key are factors in a two factor mathematical relationship.

So there can potentially be many (possibly infinitely many, I haven't tried to prove this) valid private keys for any given public key.

So I can see that, given the public key john@doe.com, I can see that there could be potentially many private keys. I see how you could brute force selecting a private key that matched your public key, and I can see that, depending how the brute-forcing is done, it would not be determinate that an attacker also trying to brute force a private key from the same public key would not come up with the same private key.

What I can't see is how, if you have a message which unlocks with the public key, how you can tell whether it was locked with the 'authentic' private key or with an attackers' inauthentic private key.

Anyone?

why this is on front page?

I used flickr years ago, then I switched to 500px. Yesterday I wanted to check out how flickr looks now, I did basic test - display best photos. On 500px you can just click "popular" and you can browse amazing photography. How to do it on flickr? After few minutes I resigned, because all I saw was just crap.

If they can't be limited then I'll settle for the PTO admitting that software is math (which it clearly is) and banning all software patents.

In my opinion patents in software and electronics have perverted from promoting the arts and sciences to destroying them. Pretty sure the founding fathers didn't intent for 300,000 patents a year to be issued. It was 50 years before the PTO broke 500/yr.

The bar for patents need to be raised much higher. One way of raising that bar is to simply limit the number being granted. Only grant a patent for something that truly is a significant invention. I don't believe anywhere close to 300,000 significant inventions are made each year.

Imagine if we only granted 50 patents a year in each field allowing patents. 50 patents is a small enough number that humans working in these fields could be expected to know what is patented and to then respect those patents. (50 * 20 yrs = 1,000 patents). In this model the granting of a patent would be an event in the field, get press coverage and everyone would read the patent to learn about the new discovery. Everyone would know about these 50 patents, infringement would be rare and the value of the patents would be high.

Instead we get 500 new patents a day in software and electronics. Nobody reads them and they just function as landmines when someone accidentally reinvents.

Think of a patent as a mini-Nobel prize instead of cannon fodder for lawyers.

Shifting it to the courts is a very effective filter. Most of the rejected applications will not get appealed since they aren't worth the burden of the cost of the appeal. But the PTO may make mistakes and this would allow them to remedy those mistakes.

An alternative would be to allow for reapplication with the same priority date but require the inclusion of more evidence of why the patent should be granted. Of course if the PTO still doesn't believe it makes the cut into the 10K a month it will get rejected again.

The trade off for granting a patent is disclosure. Something valuable - a government monopoly - is granted in exchange for this disclosure. So why doesn't anyone read patents to learn from this disclosure? A few may get read but most patents do not contain anything interesting to someone practicing in the field. I would say this demonstrates that the value in many patents is the ability to cause legal problems not the actual technology being disclosed.

Keep a pool of about two months worth of patents that might meet the bar of being granted. Then reject the rest. The value of a patent is inversely correlated to how many patents are being granted. When there are fewer patents on better ideas, those patents will be respected and fulfill the original purpose that inspired the creation of patents.

Software patents are just totally broken. It is far, far too easy for a good software engineer to infringe dozens of patents through independent invention. And no one is going to go read through 100,000 patents and become aware of what has already been patented. So no one knows that they have "infringed" until they get a demand letter in the mail. Then of course they gag on licensing demands over something they have also spent resources on developing.

The problem is that the patent office is a papermill and the number of patents being granted has be growing at around 5% a year compounded for the last 25 years. I'm pretty certain that the number of patentable inventions found each year is not growing at 5%. Instead the definition of what is patentable keeps expanding into areas where it doesn't belong. The growth mainly benefits patent lawyers and patent office employees. We've gone from granting 100,000 patents a year 20 years ago to 300,000 a year now.

Do a little projecting out - if that same growth is maintained in 20 years they'll be granting 900,000 patents a year. And we'll have a pool of 12 million active patents to deal with. To support all that you'll need 25,000 or more examiners. Of course patent infringement lawsuits will be totally out of control - no human can be expected to know the contents of 12M patents and not infringe on them. Heck, I can only read three or four before my head explodes.

The simple fix is to limit the patent office to granting a fixed number of patents each month. And I'd set that limit at 10,000 or less per month. Doing that stabilizes the number of employees at the patent office. And do you really believe there are 10,000 inventions made each month worthy of patent protection? I sure don't believe that there are that many. I'd set the limit even lower - 5,000 or less. Setting the limit lower simply gets rid of the junk and makes the ones that do get granted more valuable.

You have to wonder how much the employees were really hurt by this. It was a 'no poaching' agreement. That meant that recruiters from those companies weren't going to call down the entire Rolodex of the competing firms and try to recruit. But.... there are nothing stopping external recruiters from doing that. And there was nothing stopping individuals from switching on their own.

There's some logic to an agreement like that. Each of these firm's recruiters could waste huge amounts of employee time in their competitors by making thousand of recruiting calls.

It's a class action. The only person that is really winning here is the lawyer that is getting $150,000,000 for bringing the suit.

And what magic do you propose to use in order to expand the FIXED length address fields in the IPv4 header?