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.

For me, still one. I never use a hub when away from my desk, and always use one when I'm at my desk. Think of it as a docking station and that's pretty much my usage pattern. If I can get a thinner or lighter laptop by throwing away the "extra" ports, I'd leap at the chance.

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.

That is the oddest mortality unit I've heard in a long time.

Well, not every day (or even every month), but that's not impossible at a nice anniversary meal with wine, steaks, and dessert.

(It helps if you live in San Francisco and get used thinking of a $12 burger and fries as a cheap lunch.)

This one?

"As a general thing, I have not 'duped the world' nor attempted to do so... I have generally given people the worth of their money twice told."

The one you're likely thinking of is irrelevant here, because I've spent more on dinners than I did on my Sport watch that's due for delivery today. You say "suckers", I say "people who don't mind spending $350 on a watch they'll be using every day and that's easily worth the money in sheer entertainment value".

They do, and the problem is that they treat it exactly like one. When you buy a lock, do you immediately re-key it? No: you use it as-is. Now maybe if the key looked very suspicious, like say it was a perfect sine or square wave or it was completely smooth, then you might ask the blacksmith whether that's normal. I bet those shopkeepers would be asking the same of their POS installer if the password was "123456" or "111111".

But to their (and my) untrained eye, "166816" looks reasonably random. It looks as random as my Schlage house key does. Maybe there's a locksmith forum where experts are making fun of me for not changing my obviously default lock. After all, they can tell at a glance that I have the standard factory issue! How stupid am I for using it without making my own pattern!

No, I think you're exactly wrong. People think of these passwords as keys. They use the ones manufacturers give them. They hand them out to the same staff that have keys to the front door and cash drawers. They don't routinely change them when people quit. They don't audit their usage. They treat them just like the little medal danglies on the ring in their pocket, no more, no less. We've done a very poor job of telling them why they should think otherwise.

Or you could just buy it directly through the device like everyone else does. I haven't bought music through a desktop iTunes app in a long time.

I hereby present you with today's Indignant Goldberg award for simultaneously finding the most convoluted way possible to perform a common operation and also bitching about its difficulty.

So much this. In the Slashdot echo chamber we presume that everyone in the world should be the security experts we are. No one outside forums like this thinks the way we do. Your average mom & pop grocer doesn't know about security, can't imagine what a "default password" is or why it would be bad, and sees a POS as an appliance much like a refrigerator or stove.

Tell a restaurateur that they're stupid for not changing the default password, and they're likely to tell you how your stupid home food storage and cooking methods are likely to give you listeriosis. We are experts in our domain, and expecting everyone else to care about it (especially while remaining ignorant of their specialties) is a major failing on our part, not theirs.