Comment Pure profit? (Score 1) 304
Pure profit? More like Pure Extortion
Comment Conflict of Interest? (Score 4, Informative) 311
I don't doubt that a lot of cyber-spying is going on, but also note that Clarke is now CEO of Good Harbor Consulting, which coincidentally makes a boatload of money dong Cyber consulting. The more frenzy he whips up, the more money he rakes in.
Comment Re:Complete lack of security (Score 2) 136
Hmmm... With some restrictions, the US Department of Defense has approved use of Android and not IOS:
http://www.bgr.com/2011/12/28/pentagon-approves-android-device-for-department-of-defense-apple-still-awaits-clearance/
Comment Care for a $5,000 Ethernet cable? (Score 1) 369
Care for a $5,000 Ethernet cable? AudioQuest will be glad to sell you one of those too. Or maybe you'll spring for the $42,000 speaker cables? Fill your shopping cart using the handy price list found here:
http://www.audioquest.com/pdfs/AQ-Retail-PB-2011-NOV-220d.pdf
Comment Here's an incentive for better Patents (Score 0) 205
How about every time the courts throw out a patent, the patent office sees its budget reduced by the amount of money spent by the lawyers on both sides to get that decision made? Maybe that's just a drop-in-the-bucket, but perhaps it would make the Patent office think twice about granting clearly weak or overly-broad patents and letting the court system decide the validity of said-patent.
Comment Re:tl; dr version (Score 1) 205
Seems like the PTO might operate better if they had the budget to pay for their operations costs
Maybe. But the cynical economist in me sees danger. Bureaucracies, just like people, will act in their own best interest. if the Patent office becomes funded by their customers (the patent filers), then the Patent office has every incentive to make those customers happy so they'll come back for more, pay more fees and increase the budget of the Patent office. If the Patent office cracks down on weak or overly-broad patents, then their customers will be discouraged from filing more patents, and the Patent office will see a reduced budget. The incentives are all wrong.
Comment Re:tl; dr version (Score 3, Insightful) 205
The US Patent Trade Office FINALLY gets to keep the fees it collects..
Sounds like a disaster in-making to me. What if the Sheriff's office got to keep all the funds that it confiscated? No doubt there'd be a lot more arrests and confiscated funds. Same with the patent office. The Patent office will just issue more and more and more patents as it's now in their best interest. "Come one, come all, file your patents, On sale this week only!"
Comment Reminds me of the one (Score 4, Interesting) 161
Reminds me of the one my brother built here except my brother's computer runs Minux.
Comment Re:Place the bill in context of the current statut (Score 2) 239
That's the intent of the law. But what if Susie's mother embeds that movie on her own web page for all her friends to see? And what if Susie's mom has a few Google Ads on that web page (private financial gain)? And then, for whatever reason that these things happen, Susie's cute video goes viral, Mom's web page gets hundreds of thousands of hits, and those ads get clicked on generating a few thousand dollars? Well guess what? Mom is now a potential felon.
Comment Techdirt discussion of the issue (Score 1) 239
There's a good discussion of the issue below.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110609/23171814649/people-realizing-new-anti-streaming-criminal-copyright-bill-could-mean-jail-time-lip-synchers.shtml
As usual, the broad language of a bill like this creates the possibility of many unintended consequences. Here's my comment from that discussion:
OK, say a mother is recording her kid's fifth birthday party along with the whole gang singing "Happy Birthday to You!". A mishap occurs that makes it particularly funny, so the uploaded YouTube video goes viral and her personal web page with the embedded movie gets a lot of hits and ad impressions.
Doesn't sound too far-fetched huh? Oops, the song "Happy Birthday to You" is under copyright protection. Looks like Momma is heading to the Big House for a five-year stint. Don't worry, she'll be out just in time for junior's 10th!
OK, say a mother is recording her kid's fifth birthday party along with the whole gang singing "Happy Birthday to You!". A mishap occurs that makes it particularly funny, so the uploaded YouTube video goes viral and her personal web page with the embedded movie gets a lot of hits and ad impressions.
Doesn't sound too far-fetched huh? Oops, the song "Happy Birthday to You" is under copyright protection. Looks like Momma is heading to the Big House for a five-year stint. Don't worry, she'll be out just in time for junior's 10th!
Submission + - Boot Linux in your browser? (bellard.org)
Jim Buzbee writes: "Ever had the desire to run an X86 emulator written in Javascript? Ever want to use that emulator to boot Linux right in your browser? Think it's a hoax? Think again and prepare to have your jaw hit the floor!"
200 Students Admit Cheating After Professor's Online Rant
693
Over 200 University of Central Florida students admitted to cheating on a midterm exam after their professor figured out at least a third of his class had cheated. In a lecture posted on YouTube, Professor Richard Quinn told the students that he had done a statistical analysis of the grades and was using other methods to identify the cheats, but instead of turning the list over to the university authorities he offered the following deal: "I don't want to have to explain to your parents why you didn't graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don't identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course."
Comment But where was Android during the funeral? (Score 4, Funny) 311
Why doing the filming of course. Big Fail for Microsoft...
Submission + - VP8 Codec coming to FFmpeg (gnome.org) 1
Jim Buzbee writes: Interested in Google's VP8 codec? Well, so were the FFmpeg guys, so they went ahead and wrote their own native decoder in only 1400 lines of unique code. They were able to keep the line-count low, by relying on heavy reuse from the existing h.264 codebase.
NASA's Space Balloon Smashes Car In Australia
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Humunculus writes "Of more worldly issues, NASA's latest multimillion-dollar stratosphere-bound balloon launch has gone horribly wrong and crashed into a car, turning it over and narrowly missing two elderly people who were observing the launch. The payload fared worse, reportedly being smashed into a 'thousand pieces.'"
