Is there any evidence (or even suspicion) that either side here used either the patent filing or actual stolen technology to create their product? If not then the laws are clearly broken when we are allowing non-revolutionary ideas to be patented.

NVIDIA holds a very large graphics patent pool. In a lot of ways they're the successor to SGI, and in the interim have picked up companies such as 3dfx, which has further enlarged their patent pool. Which makes it very, very hard to efficiently implement a GPU without violating some of those patents. Proving malice may be difficult, but it's hard to imagine building a competitive GPU and not infringing on those patents.

As for whether the patents are revolutionary, that's a trickier point. If you researched into the same problems as NVIDIA a lot of your solutions would be similar/identical even without seeing how NVIDIA does it. But for a number of these patents the solutions are non-obvious; it's only after doing research and a lot of simulation do you come up with the same answer.

No one pays the compulsory licensing fee anymore. It's all done by negotiation now. That's one of the changes Congress made in the last decade when they made licensing a viable alternative to must-carry.

I'm completely shocked that when given additional opportunity, you still won't back up your claims.

The bizarre thing is that you're accusing me of "singling out one particular issue based purely on the person implementing it," when you have literally no example of me ever doing that, ever, least of all in this discussion, where if anything I was taking Gruber's side.

Not in any way, no, I did not.

You're a liar.

I agree. I am nearly completely transparent and obvious and clear. I lack pretense or disguise.

No. It's true that the framers and most people who understand politics want the people to be ignorant about most issues in government, because otherwise, the people would be spending too much time watching government and not enough time enjoying life and being productive. Everyone should want to be ignorant about most things, especially most things government does. Otherwise you'll be miserable.

But it's not true that they want people to be ignorant, but with a delusion of lack of ignorance. You're just making things up.

There's no objective reason why it's a bad thing.

I'm a dope because you ... agreed with me? You think that little of yourself?

You're a liar.

Well, yes, people who believe what they are told -- and then profess to know those things -- without investigating it, are stupid.

Gruber was mostly right, although the word "stupid" is probably not what he meant. But the fact is that whoever believed it wasn't a tax, it wouldn't raise rates, it wouldn't force you to change plans and possibly doctors, etc., was ignorant. Not stupid, necessarily, but ignorant. That said, someone who is ignorant and thinks that he actually knows these things is kinda stupid. So all the news folks, for example, who said that what Republicans said about the ACA were lies ... they were stupid.

The fact is that almost everything the GOP said about the ACA was true. Federal funding of abortions, subsidies for illegals, massive government control defined at a later date by an administrator and not Congress, death panels, increased taxes and premiums, decreased choice ... all of it was and is true.

I'd expect an article talking about criminally prosecuting Gruber would at least make reference to some violation of the criminal code. I see no crime. Neither the author nor his interviewee mention any crime. He makes vague references to "Deceit. Fraud. Premeditated felonious theft.," but he simply gave his opinions; he didn't implement anything. The theft was by the government, not him. The fraud was perhaps aided by him, but no court has ever found that government fraud of this type is prosecutable, so prosecuting a private citizen for aiding the government in something that can't be prosecuted makes no sense.

If that were the case, more of us would get mod points more often.

What happens is that the moderation system is biased against frequent visitors. Visit more than once a day and you'll basically never get mod points. Go away for a day or two and you'll come back to a heap of them virtually every time.

I'm not sure why Slashdot does this. One would think frequent visitors would be the people you'd want modding - someone who will see a story before it's too old - but perhaps they want someone a little less fanatical? Or maybe the mod points are to entice you to stay?

Why can't the iPhone have a ATSC chip inside it?

Standard ATSC (8VSB) actually doesn't perform very well when the receiver is in motion. Multipath is bearable for static receivers, but the addition of motion and doppler shift hammers the resulting signal strength.

There's actually an ATSC addendum to deal with this - ATSC-M/H - but to the best of my knowledge it has never been widely implemented. Of course even if it was, I'm not sure if Apple would want to spend the space on the receiver and the antenna (UHF is fine, VHF is not).

No this is Google favoring new standards before some browsers are quite ready for it.

Just to add to this, 60fps works fine in Internet Explorer 11 and in Safari as well. In fact both have supported it for some time. Of the major browsers, at this point Firefox is the odd man out.

It's like that because of the artificial restrictions placed on upload speeds by the DOCSIS and ADSL protocols.

Huh? There's nothing artificial about it in the case of DOCSIS. Cable was originally designed to multicast video using a shared medium. Putting Internet on top of that is a very clever hack, but it doesn't get around some of the fundamental assumptions and designs of the system.

To download data from the node to the user you merely need to put it on one (or more) 6MHz channels, and the user's modem picks up packets destined for it while rejecting the rest. It's functionally no different from cable television; if you can get a clean TV signal on any given channel, then you can receive packets.

However uploading data is an entirely different beast. The cable infrastructure was not initially designed for 2 way communication, as it was optimized for one strong node/head-end talking to many clients. The importance of that being only one device had to do the talking, and that it could do so loudly to make up for signal degredation. However once you're talking about clients uploading, you now have to deal with signal and scheduling issues. Long story short, the only practical way to do that from a signal integrity standpoint is to use a lower bandwidth, more error tolerant encoding scheme (QAM64 up vs. QAM256 down), and furthermore you have to do it in the lowest frequencies because higher frequencies attenuate too much.

The net result is that while you potentially have 100 downstream channels, you only have around a dozen upstream channels. Which operate at a lower bandwidth and have to be shared among many clients. Consequently you simply cannot do a symmetrical network over cable due to the benefits and drawbacks of the shared medium. The laws of physics get the final say here.

Okay, I'll bite on the clickbait subject. How again is this News For Nerds?