Please don't do this, I live in Seattle and no one cares what your area code is.

Given that patents cost $1,000-$10,000 each just in fees to the USPTO and their multi-year backlog, why don't they just offer up bounties? They could assign them semi-randomly so that by the time a patent reaches an actual examiner, they would have plenty of independent reviews of the material. Given that it took Joel Joel Spolsky 10 minutes to kill a Microsoft patent, I would spend an hour or two for a cut on the fees.

We would gain nothing, hell we would still have god-damn teletype machines if everyone was worried about wasting nanoseconds of compute time. We would get some multiple of compute increase but we would loose out on the exponential increases in human productivity that comes from dealing with all of those abstractions automatically.

But I think we agree in that we need to focus on fixing the problems that need fixing. It's more important to figure out what you need done and then figure out whether you will hand-craft machine code or whip-up some javascript hack.

Ahh, engineering!

Neither Snowden nor Julian Assange are terrorists. Julian Assange may be more anti-american, but Wikileaks does not differ fundamentally from the NYT or the Guardian.

We need to protect such whistle blowers, not persecute them.

Oh no, they can stop him from doing anything that would communicate to his clients that they are being surveilled. It doesn't matter if you communicated by *not* doing something, the judge would shoot that shit down very quickly. He is likely to face significant backlash for shutting down his operation like this. Think of the old Italian mafia, do you really think they wouldn't have tried similar tactics had they been legal?

Parent has gotten low scores, but it happens more often than you would think. I personally know someone the FBI tried to plant drugs on because they had not found any on his friends (whom they had already arrested). He saw it in the police car before he got in and refused to do so until they swept it up.

They just have to pretend to smell marijuana, coerce the drug dog into faking a "hit" or claim there was an anonymous tip and they can go ape-shit on your house. Granted, I would be willing to be that a majority of the time they are right. But there is a reason why low-income communities hate cops.

If you want trust 100% of the time, you have to be fair 100% of the time

I have a hard time reading through Nokia's patents that VP8 supposedly infringes on. I thought it was just my inability to read patents, but as no-one on ask patents has been able to help...

Any slashdoters want to give it a try?

I'd like to second the parents refutation that XMission has any special connections within the church. Given that they host Maddox for free and Pete Ashdown ran as a Democrat, I doubt they have any connection with the church. Their customers might but...

Can you elaborate? Do you mean Best-Buy off the shelf or direct-from-HP off the shelf?

Exactly, Linksys gear was bottom-of-the-barrel before Cisco bought it. The quality went up a little bit, but it just isn't made to the same spec that let's Cisco charge an arm and a leg for enterprise networking gear.

As others have mentioned, the sweet spot is competitors for the corporate space, just a few notches below Cisco. HP, Ubiquity, Ruckus, they put out enterprise grade hardware that is almost affordable used.

Prosumer gear just isn't built to last, it's built to maximize feature lists while minimizing cost. Even if many of you haven't had your networking gear go down on you at your home, you are the lucky ones. I have had a litany of routers and firmwares and I have watched a few small-medium businesses try to scale up on prosumer gear. Hobbyists don't have every router hardware revision plugged into a test rig with complex networking simulations for unit tests, it's all guess-and-pray. Maybe this will change as more enterprises embracing/fund open-source networking hardware and software development. Until then, being on the cutting edge while not spending a lot of money is a recipe for headaches.

If you can't afford a $300 router, then use your ISP's modem as your main router and set everything else up as a pass-through or AP. I've tried to use DD-WRT et al. but they just don't have the resources to do the automated testing required for a high-quality product. These are modems that the ISP's purchase by the million and they have dedicated QA teams trying to bring costs down. Let the modem handle the routing, it makes the network management simpler anyway.

Finally, when your end-point eventually falls over and it's out of warranty, buy a new one from Amazon et al. and swap out your router for the new one and send the busted electronics back for a refund : )

Seriously, the cost of switching is what keeps everyone locked into their databases. Unless an alternative DB can provide a seamless drop-in replacement, the man-hours spent on re-engineering and the downtime vastly outweigh the performance improvements you might get out of it.

My pre-calculus course at a major research university had nearly 500 students. Lab/section consisted of an underpaid graduate student with poor English. I'm all for the US attracting top minds from other countries and we should fund it, but not with undergraduate tuition. That class brought in over a $1 million for that department. At 500-$1,000/credit, you can afford private one-on-one tutoring sessions at $40-$50 every day for the entire quarter. The only difference is that "student aid" (aka taxes in the form of debt) won't pay for a tutoring! On top of that, the professor also told us to expect devoting 50-100% more time than the normal credit/hour ratio.

I dropped the class and took it (in two quarters instead of one) at the local community college, where I had a class of 25. If you were lucky enough to be an honors student in HS (yes, lucky enough to have a normal childhood and good teachers) and you get on the honors track in college, you will be rewarded with small class sizes, a smaller selection of higher quality professors, scholarships, and projects instead of rote memorization.

So yes, if you give us poor grades on top of a shitload of homework and a terrible education we will be very unhappy.

But the ongoing maintenance costs of maintaining proprietary network gear would be more expensive, wouldn't it?

I was talking about video, not audio.