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Comment Unscientific fix for a scientific problem (Score 1) 4

The shipping company would weigh the cost of transport against the risk of losing the cargo and choose a route that wasn't so direct that pirates would expect you to take it, but not so long that the extra fuel and time costs would make it unprofitable.

It would make the pirate encounter all the more surprising, too.

Comment Re:Oh please please please (Score 1) 220

I think you fundamentally misunderstood his statement, thought the random throwaway statement at the beginning about software being covered by copyright didn't help.

He talked about how someone could build a machine with mechanisms (triggered by switches) built into it and patent that machine. But once that machine was invented, nobody else should be able to come along and patent using the machine with a certain set of switches on or off, because the switches and their options were already included in the original invention.

Comment Re:Drive amazon services? (Score 3, Interesting) 61

I think it's easy to see where they are going: You take your Amazon phone to the store, snap a picture of what you want, and get it shipped to you. Or not.

Amazon then uses the decisions and GPS coordinates of the people using their phone to discover that store X in your city is cheaper than Amazon. They then lower the price of that item that they show to the people whose phones are or have been in that store, until the people in that store start buying it from Amazon instead.

Comment Re:Those who can, innovate; those who can't... (Score 2) 140

On the other hand, litigation encourages innovation through design-arounds.

Aside from clear ownership of invention, it's also necessary to understand what is patented. Setting aside Microsoft's "we've patented this but we're not telling you which patents they are" there are cases like the "in-app purchase" patents that have absolutely no mention of purchasing in the claims (the claims are specifically about providing feedback to the developer through an app). Is buying a smurfberry "providing feedback"? I guess we'll have to wait for someone to spend a million bucks to fight it in court in order to find out.

Even when it's clear who owns the patent and how the patent applies, if you do a workaround you'll still likely find yourself on the other end of a C&D letter advising you that your app looks like it infringes their patent and if you don't settle now you'll face an expensive discovery process and have to hand over your source code to us to prove that your code doesn't do what the patent says it does. Not a big deal for OSS, but for proprietary software the prospect of handing over the family jewels to the competition isn't a good one.

And at the end of it all, after you've shown them your source code, shown them your workaround, shown them that you don't do what the patent says it does? They can pull the "Doctrine of Equivalents" card, and claim that despite the fact that the patent doesn't specifically name your workaround in the claims, it still applies. Enjoy your million dollar lawsuit.

Comment Re:scam is a scam...target is taxi companies (Score 1) 507

So, Samsung is scamming Apple by selling Android phones that compete with Apple's phones?

Only when they violate Apple's patents to do so.

On a more serious side, if Samsung ignored all the FCC regulations and sold untested phones to save a few bucks over Apple's FCC-regulated phones, then yes.

Comment Something HUGE happened behind the scenes (Score 1) 173

Of note is that Alienware is preconfiguring the computer to boot straight to steam. Microsoft has famously resisted OEMs dicking around with the installation for years (ever wonder why nobody sells a windows 8 computer ready to use with all the de-metroing apps pre-installed? From all the 8 hate, you'd think an "easy to use" windows 8 computer that looks like windows 7 would sell like fucking hotcakes)

Something big happened behind the scenes, whatever it was, my guess is that everyone got what they wanted from the Linux Steam box (except maybe Linux).

Comment Re:Quiet is important (Score 1) 151

It's a common laptop feature, but it works because both the awesome GPU and the cheap GPU are integrated.

You can do it on the desktop, you just have to buy a 3dfx Voodoo card :) (it had a passthrough cable so you would plug it into your regular video card then your monitor into the 3dfx card... without that you'd need to plug your monitor into your fancy gaming video card whenever you wanted to use it).

Comment Re:Liability (Score 1) 474

I didn't bother to read the story, but I'm going to talk out my ass here and assume what comcast wants to do is sell comcast customers an "on the go" service. You go visit Houston and you have 150000 hotspots you can sign into with your comcast account. The bandwidth you use is tied to your account and deducted from your account's cap.

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