you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

If only your "Exhibit A" wasn't mostly selective golden memory tinted by rose colored glasses. The "great uplift" was indeed (mostly) great - if you were a white collar worker in the city, or an industrial worker with a union. For the laborers down on the farm, the topic of discussion, not so much.

Pretty sure it was proportionally at least as good - probably better - for unskilled labour.

And even then the "great uplift" wasn't powered by smaller profit margins or worker's rights - it was powered by rising salaries, employment, and consumer spending. (Emphasis on the last.) It couldn't last, and it didn't.

You need strong worker's rights for (sustained and economy-wide) rising salaries, secure employment and, consequently, high consumer spending.

It's very common these days for companies to allow universities to use their technology at the cost of tying the company into the university's patent revenue. And of course this is often publicly-funded research, so not only is the taxpayer paying for the development of patents used to sue that same taxpayer, the patents go directly to a company from academia.

The net effect is to feed intellectual property centered companies at the expense of the technology sector in general and small technology companies in particular.

The sports thing is only really important to me during college football season, other than that, I don't watch it.

Ditto. That and Formula 1 as well. Those are really the only two sports I would regularly watch. When the World Cup comes around I would watch that as well.

Aside from that, don't really care to watch any other sports. As Homer said when he was at a baseball game after he had given up drinking beer, "I never realized how boring this game is."

Yes, let's teach our kids to take something which someone has spent time and money to produce without paying for it.

I'm sure this will go over well when they're out taking products off the shelf and claiming their parents taught it was okay to steal something.

Connectivity is huge, but it's only one of the ingredients in making this decision.

If you want the app to work for them outside of the corporate WiFi, you have to host it on the public internet, where all attackers are equally welcome without regard to skillz or skripts. Are you sure that server is secure? What about tomorrow? Are you patching it? Are your users securing their devices properly? Uh oh, it's the new version of Heartbleed, go back three spaces.

You also have to consider performance. Is this something that your users will use constantly for their jobs, or occasionally for some rare piece of info? If it's going to add one second to every screen, and you're asking people to tap their way through 600 screens a day, the inefficiency is going to cost you 10 minutes worth of payroll per user per day. Maybe you make that up in hardware costs if you force your users to bring their own smartphone to work. Maybe the sluggishness just makes your users miserable throughout the day. Or maybe it simply costs you a lot of money.

On the other side, if it's used perhaps once or twice a day by 2000 people, poor performance and connectivity issues won't be nearly as important as savings on developer costs and time to market, Or if you have only a half dozen heavy users, perhaps you're willing to eat the payroll cost of an hour per day instead of spending them on development.

It's a question best answered by the money.

Manning would almost certainly have been caught regardless. All those State Department cables could only have come from someone with access to the entire database. That's a reasonably short list of people, and everyone on it would have been grilled and inspected from head to toe.

His (her) talking about it just made the inevitable happen faster.

I'm much more cynical, and I don't think Pepsi is giving in to anyone. I think they're trying to exploit people's fears that "OMG chemicals bad". It's more like they're advertising "We're the only brand that dares to print arsenic-free on our products."

I think the real problem with Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max is that they taste more or less like regular Pepsi. Their advertising slogan may as well be "Pepsi - for when you can't afford actual Coca-Cola."

Not individual evidence, corroborated evidence. Red beets WILL make me puke. No exceptions. Even the smallest piece of beet eaten with a salad will cause this effect, something I have had all my life.

And yes, they should be removed from the market being the vile products they are.

Neither Manning nor Snowden remained anonymous. At some point the leak is so big that anonymity is not possible, and someone will pay the price for the leak.

It's the same mentality which claims recycling aluminum cans is more costly, in every sense, than getting the raw materials and making the can in the first place.

Anything to justify how evil not continuing down our current path is because if it can be shown through evidence that recycling or alternative fuels provide the same benefits we enjoy now with substantially reduced costs and/or environmental effects, their political agenda will be shown for the farce it is.