Good catch... Published, not applied for.

pending
adj (postpositive)
1. not yet decided, confirmed, or finished

While it is true that the patent system is completely broken, you really should cut the USPTO some slack here. The patent was only applied for on Thursday. It hasn't even been looked at yet!

To build a database of open wifi hotspots for Wi-Fi Geolocation to add location-based services to Android, much like how the iPhone and iPod Touch use Skyhook to do the exact same thing.

Glad I could help.

WOOSH!!!

Point well taken, even if it conflicts with the rest of your post. You say that you want to wait here.. but then propose a bunch of changes, most of which would require new laws. You can't have it both ways.

You did: Have A regulated (even non-profit) independent company (can't be owned by an ISP) run and maintain the network. I can understand if that is not what you meant, but it is what you implied.

I really don't like comments like this as they are completely unproductive. Why, Fred over there got robbed for all the good the laws and cops did! Guess we shouldn't have any laws or cops at all, giving the folks a false sense of security that they can leave their homes without being armed to the teeth.

*sigh* The idea is not to abolish something when it fails, the idea is to see where something failed and improve upon it.

This fails in a number of ways. First of all, you are just replacing a bunch of local monopolies with one big centralized one. With your suggestion of just regulating THEM, you end up really regulating the Internet. Welcome back to square one. Worse yet, your "centralized non-profit" would likely be a Government Sponsored Enterprise. As you say about the Health Department, GSEs don't have a great track record of providing great service, because they have little motivation to do so.

Lastly, the end-point "provider" companies in your scheme would struggle to find some way to differentiate their product from others. Price can only go so far, so then you'll get into network segmentation, walled gardens, "premium content", etc.... Net Neutrality effectively done for.

So, with your scheme you get the worst of both worlds -- you get a huge centralized (and probably government run) monopoly AND no net neutrality to boot.

More like hours. Right after they were bought, the software was EOL'ed. The "Pro" version was pulled immediately and users were given a week to download the Free version.

Whatever Google plans to do with it, they don't want it available in its current form. This leads me to believe they want to kill it on Windows to use on ChromeOS.

No.. you aren't imagining things. It WAS on Slashdot for about 10 minutes on Monday, specifically talking about the fact that immediately after Google bought them, the software was no longer available for sale and you could only download the free version until... well.. today.

Then it suddenly disappeared, only to reappear just before the BumpTop download cutoff.

Sorry, but you just lost all credibility right here. Anyone who claims that anything can be "completely secure" is either a) trying to sell something or b) clueless. You can say something is "more secure" or that something provides better security, but nothing, ever, will be "completely secure".

After seeing the video, I have to admit I was wondering why there was a camera zoomed in SOOOoooo close onto a senator's laptop computer.

I mean, it's not like this was a senator caught playing solitaire in a wider shot. Also, there was supposedly something more interesting going on, like a speech about an abortion bill. Why would a cameraman think to himself, "I know! Let's ignore the speech and zoom in on $randomSenator's laptop screen! That's interesting!" unless he knew something interesting was about to happen....

Speaking of people not paying attention.....I realize that you might not have read the article, but you could have at least read the TITLE, which said he's a state senator -- meaning that he votes don't affect the entire country -- just Florida.

I can think of quite a few actually.

Of the top of my head, Google's purchase of YouTube ended up working out very well. I honestly think that without Google's support, YouTube would have died by now (or at least be a few orders of magnitude smaller entity).

Another one I can think of is IBM's purchase of OTI, which led to VisualAge then to Eclipse, which is now used as the platform for just about every IBM software product, from Lotus Notes to WebSphere.

TAG! Now you are.

No one said that satire is illegal. What was said is that using someone else's copyrighted material without permission as part of the satire is not protected by fair use. Big, BIG difference.

- Using clips of a movie to make fun of that movie = parody = fair use
- Using clips of a movie to make fun of something else entirely = satire = not fair use

You can agree or disagree with the above, but that's where the courts currently stand on the issue.

(As an aside, Twain, et al, didn't use other people's copyrighted works in their satires)

Really, the only thing you are saying here is that you like YOUR big, bloaty thing over someone else's big, bloaty thing. There's really nothing insightful about that at all.

You have a set of tools you are comfortable with, and others have theirs. Each have their merits and each have their drawbacks. What is new is not necessarily an improvement and what is old is not necessarily the best. To discard either out of hand on their "whiz-bangedness" or "tried-and-truedness" rather than on its merits is the mark of a fool.