You also need to filter the kind of knowledge you are saving. You don't need in depth scientific journals with a lot of highly specific knowledge, but you might need some trivia on the 14th US president's wife's cooking habits...

Also, the greater the amount of data, the longer it's going to take to look through it. You can only do so much with key words and indexes. This is not only a contest of how accurate you are, but of how fast you can retrieve the information, sometimes even before the entire question has been asked (or in this case, guessing the question before you know the entire answer....)

In many ways, this challenge is vastly more complex than chess. The game of chess is incredibly difficult, but it is pretty well understood, and has a very restricted number of rules. Natural language processing is another problem altogether. The computer has a much faster access to facts, but processing the "answer" in order to create a question in the right context is going to be huge. Personally, I wouldn't place any bets either way as to which side I think will win in this one.

I actually think the car analogy is a poor one. That would imply that car manufacturers, or even the dealers, KNEW about bad drivers, and had a way of disabling their automobiles.

ISP's can tell with a fair degree of certainty that a computer they have connected to the network is spewing either spam, or participating in a known 'botnet. They also have a way to contact the user to tell them that something is happening. Also, having an infected computer isn't usually something the user chooses, and they often have no idea of what is going on. That's not to say that we should be making laws that force ISP's to act regardless of the circumstances. That's more like telling someone they can only use a baseball bat to fix a pair of eyeglasses.

On the other hand, this is COMPLETELY different from "bad people" who are doing things like file sharing or downloading stuff, or even using more than their share of Internet bandwidth. Writing laws to force ISPs to become the puppets of the big media monopolies is BAD, BAD, BAD.

Granted, this is a local public radio station in upstate NY, but you can stream it anywhere. WXXI is one of the vanishing breed of predominantly Classical radio stations here in the US. They have some jazz programs, and a little bit of news (and you have to put up with the occasional Public Radio fundraisers), but it is probably 90% high quality classical music programming: http://streaming.wxxi.org/fm-hi

(The station has been around for something like 40 years, so it's the station I grew up on!)

Since the total cost of settling a patent suit is often proportional to the length of time it takes to settle, then yes, getting the stupid thing over as fast as possible is often the best approach. Even putting it through a lopsided court is going to eliminate the most obvious offenders, so at least you still have a reasonable chance of winning, without wasting a lot of time and money if you do lose.

Unfortunately, this little factoid will be quoted by marketing droids and microsofties for years to come... :-(

Hummm..... Another option to get around the patent would be to use ODF. THAT would be easy, and free to boot!

The problem seems to be though that the courts and the USPTO are stuck in a game of passing the buck.

The USPTO says, "We don't have the resources of domain knowledge to figure out if all patents are valid, so we'll just approve anything that looks reasonable, and then let the courts haggle it out."

For the most part (unless the lawyers specifically steer the case in a different direction), the Courts say, "Well, we're experts in the LAW, not in patents, so if the USPTO granted the patent, then we'll just assume they are valid, and then determine if the person or company infringed them."

They certainly don't care, or don't think they are responsible for determining who is a "Troll" and who is legitimate. So, we're stuck with a system that's easy for people to get in to, but hard to throw the abusers out of....

Good point, especially since it is claimed that even servers which are not configured to accept dynamic updates are still vulnerable.

It's unlikely that, if you're running a DNS server inside of your private network, someone on the outside is going to be able to hit it. But then, like all other vulnerabilities, you combine this one with a couple of other attacks (such as a non-privileged login), and all of the sudden you've got something really dangerous. :-(

BTW - Wine is pretty hit-and-miss with games, but when it works, it's beautiful. If you haven't tried wine recently, you should go back and look at it again. Unfortunately, Ubuntu still insists on using the "stable" 1.1.x release, which is a couple of years old now I think! You may even need to download the sources and rebuild, or just try it under a Fedora release.

That being said, I'm going to be interested in seeing how the 3D works in VirtualBox.....

Cool! After the umpteenth million time of not being able to build VMware Server under the latest kernel version, and this time NOT being able to find yet-another-vmware-any patch to fix it, I finally abandoned VMware (at least for personal use) and switched back to VirtualBox. Looks like I made the right decision right, just in time.

I'm still using VMware for server virtualization at work, but for running one of Uncle Bill's products on my desktop, it looks like VirtualBox is a better solution.

I will be interested in seeing how it works with USB. That's always been a bug-a-boo for me--getting USB devices to talk to the VM. This release sounds like they've cleaned up some things. I will be really interested in how it performs with some of my games that require 3D. (I'm talking like Guild Wars, not the latest releases.)

> Finally, there is a very simple solution. Don't install software that does things you don't want it to do.

The problem is that people aren't "installing" software, at least not in their minds. They are following what security experts have been screaming about for years -- namely keeping up to date on their MS security updates. They don't know that this is a feature upgrade. It's just something that tags along with all the other security updates they are dutifully downloading and applying.

What are you going to do? Tell grandma to install only those MS updates which she understands? Yea, like that's going to help.

Haven't read the PA yet, but I think the point is that the *attorneys* themselves shouldn't be blogging. Someone like you or me, or PJ, should be able to read about a case and state our own opinions (Freedom of Speech and all that), but if you are directly involved in a case, you have to be very careful what you say, and to whom.

OK, OK, now I'll go and read the article....

Patents are hideously complicated, and very difficult to search, since the wording is intentionally vague. This is one of the reasons why patents are so bad for Open Source. Unless you're fabulously rich and can afford a gaggle of IP lawyers, there is no way you can check the THOUSANDS of existing patents to see if the concept you're actually implementing is something that some other person had a vague idea about some years ago, and then had enough $$$$ to actually apply for a patent on