The thing that commenters over at Ars haven't picked up on - this patent is only infringed if the customer wears the headphones without playing music. Noise cancellation with added music - OK, there's prior art for that. Turn the music off - it becomes patentable technology.

The claim states that Bose is on the hook because their documentation states that you can use the headphones without music for noise cancellation only, which induces their customers to infringe Bose's patents.

How is that legit? How can not adding music create a patentable technology?

Not at all!

But as it currently stands, Comcast's customers are paying Comcast to delver the data from Netflix at up to the speed the customer is paying for. For Comcast to help fund Netflix' expansion so that they could better support Comcast's customers' demands might, just "might," be reasonable. For Comcast to hold Netflix to ransom is certainly not.

"If a broadband provider were to {snip} block or degrade access to its site if it refused to pay a significant fee, such a strategy almost certainly would be self-defeating, in light of the immediately hostile reaction of consumers to such conduct."

You mean the hostile reaction you are getting right now as you do exactly that? Like how every one of your customers that has any other option dumps you in a heartbeat?

Yes, if anyone should be paying anyone, it is Verizon/Comcast that should be paying Netflix, as Netflix is providing the content that Veriz/cast sell to their subscribers.

Companies: Hey Courts, Aero is a cable company!
Aero: We really aren't.
Courts: I agree with the Companies. Aero is a cable company.
Aero: Sigh, I guess we'll have to become a cable company then.
Companies: I Object! Aero isn't a cable company!

But I can also apply physics and see how the danger is very small.

The biggest point is that the sky is big and both the shells and the drone are small. The chance of the two coming into contact is negligible. The risk of anything bad happening if that happens is also very small - the only thing I can see happening is if a rotor happens to cut the shell's fuse. The shell is too heavy for a fragile drone to have much effect on it.

The drone genie is out of the bottle. This is the world we not live in - where the possibility of a cheap RC craft being in a particular airspace has to be taken into account.

The shell smashes the drone into tiny bits of confetti, and continues on it's merry way. Or, more likely the shell snaps off a rotor arm without noticing.

They will not bounce off each other like billiard balls. That's what happens when you have a collision between equal mass objects in which kinetic energy is conserved. This would be a collision between different mass objects where energy is lost to work - destroying the drone. The one with the most momentum wins.

Professional fireworks are mortar-fired shells, not rockets that can go off-course if nudged. So if a shell hit the drone on the way up, it would smash straight through it and keep on going. There is not enough mass in a drone, and a drone is not solid enough, to deflect the solid mass of a firework shell travelling at speed. It might not quite reach the same height by a few meters, or might end up a couple of feet off target, but neither of these things would matter.

And if the drone is up at altitude where the shells explode, then there is even less speed involved. The shell has reached it's height - so what if it taps a drone before detonating.

There is also whole lot of sky, and both shells and drones are small. The chance of the two coming together is practically nil.

Amazing pictures captured with zero risk. Images from a drone up there amongst it all should be a permanent feature of firework presentations.

The area under a fireworks show already gets peppered with the remains of all the exploded shells. A little added debris from a drone struck by part of the fireworks would make no difference. They always make sure that the fallout zone is in a safe area.

Add to that that the shells are mortar-fired, not rockets, and the risk of this is practically nil. Way less than the risks of just using and handling all that explosive.

Every professional fireworks show - at least, all those that are televised - should include shots from a drone up there amongst it all. The spectacular pictures are well worth the tiny risk.

That just means that it is in an elliptical orbit, out near its apogee. That orbit will pull it closer, speeding it up, until it reaches its perigee, which will throw it back out to its apogee. Around and around we go, unless the perigee is within the atmosphere.

Mind you, it was able to drop most of it by running into the top of the earth's atmosphere. The space shuttle orbits within the outer reaches of earth's atmosphere - the sun's atmosphere is a very long way away.

In order to take something from earth orbit and get it to the sun, you have to take it from earth's speed of 30 km/sec and slow it down to zero. Only when will it fall into the sun. If you leave any of that orbital speed on that object, then it will miss the sun, swing around it like a comet, and head back to where it came from. You could perhaps use a fly-by of Venus and/or Mercury to help you with that, but it's still a near-impossible thing to do. This is what is meant here by de-orbit.

... although it undoubtedly would be a good move. Good for Australia, although a better move would not involve transporting the stuff halfway across the planet.

This is one ex-politician speaking - and speaking more sense than he ever did while in office.

It's a myth that we don't know what to do about nuclear waste - we know exactly what to do with it - cast it in ceramics, drill a deep hole into old, stable rock, place it in the hole, and seal it. Oh, after reprocessing and using fast breeder reactors to reuse most of it. All we have to do is just do it - but it is too easy to raise pseudo-environmental and NIMBY anger to prevent it actually happening.

I seem to be locked into beta on my phone, and it just simply doesn't work. 3 comments down, and the comments are single-word lines, and a few more nested comments down, even that breaks. Even though I visit classic.slashdot.org, i end up at beta.

Look, someone with black-hat skills, track down their dev environment and rm -r it for us, please?