Lather, rinse, EPEAT.

Several have lambasted the judge for making the statement that he doesn't believe that software patents are necessary, saying that he should confine himself to making judgements on matters of law. However, it's important that a judge make such statements if he observes in the execution of his duties that the application of the law and precedent is not serving the purpose for which it was enacted, or is adversely affecting the court's ability to perform its duty (e.g., something precipitates a flood of lengthy but pointless lawsuits that clog the courts and defer hearing of more substantive cases).

It's precisely this feedback which should be informing legislators and prosecutors on how to reform legislation and prioritize enforcement efforts.

In the case of software patents, there's quite a bit of legal, historical, and practical arguments as to why software patents should not exist (at least in the form that device patents do), but there's been very little formal challenge to the idea, and the USPTO and the courts are substantially and adversely impacted by it (not to mention the industry).

Of course there's no dangerous RF. That's just plain stupid.

However, with regard to invasions of privacy... The meters are capable of reporting daily variations in consumption of electricity. Readable at a distance, a third party could assess when consumption levels are very low (house probably unoccupied) or inconsistently low for several days in a row (occupants probably away on vacation). So, what you basically have is a radio beacon that lights up "Rob us, were out".

I imagine that this could be fixed if there is a very good encryption and authentication/authorization scheme -- but how likely is that?

It seems to me that the Facebook app's issues are not so much about HTML5 performance, but rather the way that they handle transactions with their servers. The network performance of the app is atrocious. Look at the traffic of the iOS app and compare it to the Facebook mobile website. How many hundreds of XMLHTTPRequests do you think it should take to render a page?

There's nothing inherently wrong with the HTML5, it's their ludicrous network activity that kills the app.

It seems that if Oracle successfully argues this point, everybody that provides Oracle with a library is going to demand a license fee. Imagine if Brian Kernighan decided that the C standard library ought to be generating more (well, some) income...

Google and Facebook were just NSA and CIA fronts. The best part would be that they have an almost self-sustaining business model so the cost of running it is defrayed. People get cheap software, and the government gets cheap information on the users plus surveillance and tracking devices in every pocket...

The were labelled "iPhone" with the Apple logo. The police were only called when several unsuspecting consumers reported getting sever burns on their ears when attempting to make a call. One person lost an index finger just trying to dial police.

What the state representative is reacting to is not law, but policy. The use of "nude-o-scopes" and invasive pat-downs are not codified in federal law, so restricting their use is fair game. The supremacy clause arguably applies only to laws, not regulations or policies enacted outside of the law.

The TSA screeners aren't law enforcement officers. They cannot themselves arrest you or prevent you from passing through security without the aid of a local or state police officer. If the state and locality decide not to respond to an individual breaching security -- well, the breach happens. A state could simply make a rule preventing police officers from arresting people that refuse certain types of screening and permitting them to, essentially, bypass security.

States also don't have to their waive public safety laws (such as those pertaining to radiation exposure and operator requirements for such devices), nor sexual battery laws (TSA screeners are not law enforcement officers, and even if they were, the touching of breasts/genitals would only be permitted by court order or with reasonable cause). Technically speaking, my state would be well within its rights to enforce it's current laws on operation of X-ray emitting equipment if it is shown that the operator is not a licensed radiologist, if the use of the device is not for a medical purpose, and if the devices are not inspected and tested on the required schedule. That'd be a $25 fine per person screened, and perhaps a couple of weeks in prison for the operator.

In Adobe's announcement regarding the end of mobile Flash support, they stated that they were conceding to HTML5 in the web browser and will be focusing on moving Flash to desktop platform application development. While I suppose it was subtly stated, the implication was that they intend to phase out Flash as a browser plug-in entirely. Linux/X11 was already the most difficult for them to implement and had the highest cost/benefit, so it makes perfect sense for it to be the first to go. I imagine Google wants to keep Legacy Flash for Chrome on Linux if for no other reason than to secure another leg up on the browser competition. Overall, Google probably would just assume Flash die off, but if they can get buy-in from Linux users and push WebM and Dart in the process, then it's worth the effort.

The article is based on speculation. One of the bits of speculation, that CUPS would do away with PPD support, shows a lack of knowledge about how CUPS works on OS X and how the driverless print system (to support iOS devices) works. Namely, the PPDs are still required for the printer server (computer) to setup the printer with the appropriate features, color spaces, etc. CUPS requires a filter to translate the driverless print job (PDF or JPEG) to the raster protocol used by the device as specified in the PPD. For OS X, it's true that it's Quartz and Linux the filters will be different, but this is not so different than how it's been all along anyway.

The one thing that does ring true, however, would be moving from CUPS' proprietary CUPS-to-CUPS automatic discovery protocol to Zeroconf (Bonjour). There's a whole number of reasons that would make sense (for Linux just as much as OS X).

At $10,000 for a license, the software you sell is not a consumer product. That's not to say that a consumer may not want to use it, but that you've already discounted them as a customer. You should simply not trouble yourself with thwarting them because they would never be able to pay for it. They aren't your clients and by familiarizing themselves with your product, they may well turn their employer or future employers into clients. Some companies even embrace the idea by offering unsupported no-cost versions for non-commercial use.

Once you've decided that your customer base will only be professional / commercial customers, then the license is the important part. A commercial customer stands to loose A LOT if they are caught using unlicensed software. For them, they should consider the software part of their cost of doing business. If your product is too pricey, they should select another, otherwise, they need to purchase it and expense it. If you catch a customer using unlicensed copies, contact them and give them an opportunity to true up (after all, sometimes companies simply loose track of how many licenses they purchased - crappy license management is rampant). If a company still continues to use unlicensed versions of the software, then have a lawyer draft a demand for payment (and consider terminating their licenses; mind you, you'll loose them as a customer). When all else fails, file an infringement claim against them.

There's simply no DRM scheme that's 100% effective, and it only needs to be cracked once for it to become widely available. DRM schemes cost vendors like you lots of money to implement, and they are invariably a nuisance to the customers that legitimately license your software. Ultimately, DRM makes the pirated copies more valuable -- they are more portable between systems as they are upgraded, there are no dongles, issues with license key management, etc. It would be hard to make the case that DRM is likely to pay for itself.

Monsanto spun off it's chemical business in 1997 as Solutia, in part to distance itself from the liability of Agent Orange and PCBs. In 2000, Monsanto merged with Pharmacia (who had bought Solutia earlier), and the company was gutted and restructured, and left as a seed company with the glyphosate division. Shortly thereafter, Monsanto was spun off as a separate company again (Pharmacia mostly wanted GD Searle). The chemical business (at that point, part of Pharmacia), Solutia, went bankrupt in 2003.

There's the question whether the modern Monsanto is the correct party to hold liable. For a short period in 2000-2002, there was no separate company called Monsanto, just a brand. The current Monsanto is pretty much Dekalb Genetics with a new name.

It's interesting that Monsanto is considered the sole liable party.

For what it's worth, all of the power companies publish reports of the breakdown of their energy sources. Most have varied sources. My power company gives options for "Basic" service, which is the standard portfolio (they are divested of their generation assets; they buy it), and two levels of "Green" which is either 50% wind, or 100% wind-generated power.

According to their 2011 report, in 2010 the got 31.9% from gas, 29.1% from nuclear, 11.8% from Oil, 10.7% from coal, etc. I have basic service, so I know mine is a mix, but mostly natural gas and nuclear.

In this particular case, the gist of the method is widely known, understood, and, frankly, obvious to anyone that cared. They simply applied artificial selection on the population to select for strains with a higher virulence -- no genetic engineering or manipulation involved.This is already an obvious inexpensive and simple approach to anyone that wanted to try it, provided that they had an inkling of biology knowledge and a desire to do so. Further, it highlights that there's a series of natural mutations that could occur in the wild to the same effect. Presumably, it suggests that we should be prepared for the eventual natural occurrence of this strain.

It's important to note that the product of these experiments was not something that's highly transmissible or deadly to humans, but rather to ferrets. It's presumed that it may (or some variant may) be a threat to humans, but that was never assessed.

For a typical terrorist, being able to control the distribution would be key. Part of a terrorist act is showing that you are in control of the situation and the other party is not. To that end, they'd prefer something stable outside the human body, transferrable by physical contact, with a long enough gestation time to be able to distribute to a large area before the outbreak is recognized. High mortality would probably be preferred, but debilitation would be just as good.

Something highly infectious by contact and aerosol would be good for a sociopathic ecoterrorist, but the key would really be to get a strain that remains as asymptomatic as possible post-infection but ultimately has high mortality. If people get sick the day after exposure, it's likely to be contained. If you developed a strain where there was an infectious period of 3-4 weeks before symptoms set in but still had high mortality, you'd kill off most of the industrialized world.

I have always mused about how a grass-roots citizen intelligence agency that monitors the government and it's agents might be realized. It's not a matter of turn-about being fair play, but one of the notion of checks and balances. The US system of government only functions properly to the degree that it's transparent and accountable. There's lots of practical issues, not the least of which is that closely monitoring the government or blowing the whistle can often be illegal under current law. Nonetheless, Anonymous already exists as a Citizen's Intelligence Agency of sorts, and I think that's a trend that will continue.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Custodiret eos,