A programmable remote you tell what frequencies to use; a non programmable you choose from a table of frequencies that different manufacturers are known to use.

Actually, Amazon claims it was for defensive purposes only.

In that case they only had to publish a blog post to generate prior art. And it would have been a lot cheaper. Or are you suggesting that Amazon don't know how patents work ?

what the industry now calls POTS

It's been called POTS for at least 20 years. Sheesh, kids these days

.

I think that it's a little bit late to come out with the "we almost caught him, we were so close" story.

The TSA doesn't work. If they were more focused on quality of information than groping and assuming everyone is a terrorist, then maybe, maybe they could have caught him.

How many TSA agents were working in Boston around the time of the bombing; how many checkpoints did they pass, how many innocent people were inconvenienced and they still didn't catch the brothers until after the event and a long drawn out chase and firefight. They even cornered the surviving brother in a small boat, injured and then had to shoot him upteen times in order to capture him.

I have been to other countries, such as Singapore, where porn and censorship laws are stricter. They don't have problems accessing porn. They have less easy access to free speech, but they know where they can talk freely.

Most of the time the justification for such things is not "think of the children", but social harmony or "protection of public morals".

It's like a handful of sand. The tighter the grip, the more slips through your fingers.

No, it's down to politicians who don't know what they're talking. Specifically, the UK Prime Minister who wants his kids to surf Facebook. Nothing to do with practicalities of real life or security theatre.

I hope some management gets fired.

They obviously didn't use a designer for this project. I'm not a designer but I'm pretty confident that I could come up with a better design than that.

But does anyone care ? I mean Ya-who ? I used to use them for email but they kept "upgrading" (i.e. redesign with less features) the service.

With that line there you clearly demonstrated you don't know what you're talking about.

Despite the fact that none of them support animations; they are either completely over the top or utterly basic. Let me see, BMP - if you ever used this "standard" you would know it's pretty awful and not standard. TGA would be fine if this was 1986, we might as well switch to PPM. EXR would be great if we wanted animations to be some kind of WebGL substitute and WEBP, well we might as well switch to JPEG-2000.

By the way, that last bit wasn't facetious. I like JPEG-2000 a lot more than WEBP. And it's a standard.

So Joel Spolsky writes about how efficient and wonderful his own website is and no one here notices ? OK, sterling work on shooting down a rubbish patent, but that is how the US patent system has been working for a long, long time. If any one had come after me with a claim of infringement on such a patent I would have laughed.

Absolutely right. It's been hilarious the last few days to see the UK press get themselves worked up because they might actually be forced to respect the law. What did they think they would get after the hacking scandal inquiry ? A "don't do it again" ? It's been clearly proven that they can't be trusted to regulate themselves.

This is a total non-story designed to scare the UK underclasses.

Not all Free software is open source and not all open source is free. It seems to me that your only concern is that the software is free; that's how you phrased it.

Yes, I think if your company uses open source software then you should try to give something back because you are a commercial user and you are no doubt saving a bundle of money.

"I am trying to set up a surveillance system ... from the fixed cameras around our facility"

I see, so when you say Open Source what you really mean is Free because this has nothing to do with using and contributing something back. Otherwise you would have said so.

For example, you could donate to the programmers who make the software that you decide to use. You could have an interesting custom requirement that you could make a module for and release as OSS. Or you could find and fix bugs or documentation for some existing package. Why don't you offer to do something like that in your question ?

I love this report about the article:

One user, Taylor Winkelmeyer, wrote: "I clicked on the link because I thought the warning was a joke. "I am furious I had to see something like this. Someone please tell me how to get it off my feed."

It's got to be fake, right ?

You know the one; just cut it out; I'm not going to tell you again.

Yeah, but he wasn't black he was Klingon.