From the article:

Ericsson predict that 5G's latency will be around one millisecond - unperceivable to a human and about 50 times faster than 4G.

Love to see how that's going to work when your destination is on the other side of the planet. The speed of light is only 300,000 km/s or 300 km/millisecond.

Yes. They introduced a thing several months (maybe a year now) ago which gives you five inboxes instead of one. There's one for Social that catches all the stupid emails social networking things send you. There's one for Promotions that catches commercial email (at least, whatever isn't spam-boxed instead). There's one poorly defined one called Updates which is supposed to be for receipts, statements, bills, and confirmations - email related to stuff you bought or business you are involved in, as opposed to Store X's weekly email which is in promotions. And one for Forums is meant to be email from mailing lists. There is also the Primary inbox for everything else, which is meant to be just the real email from friends and such after everything else goes into the other boxes.

This never worked well. The social filter is pretty good. But I am on one mailing list which ends up in Promotions about 2/3 of the time, despite my repeatedly telling GMail to deliver it to Forums instead, and despite the mailing list having no commercial content whatsoever. The filter for Updates is really whacked; anything can end up in here, and the stuff that should go here can end up in Forums, Promotions, or Primary instead.

The new thing sounds similar, but on steroids. More like using labels (which are GMail's equivalent of folders to file email into, except that emails can have more than one label and so the folders aren't exclusive), but letting Google determine the labels by itself. We'll see how good that works.

The first story about "on a computer" patents getting invalidated is a good thing. But the second story is perhaps even more important. People are taking notice that patent examiners are not doing their jobs. Too many of them are just working one day a week/month/whatever and just rubberstamping their quota of patents, allowing anything whatsoever through the system, and falsely reporting that they worked full time and even overtime, because there is a corrupt culture that lets them get away with it. Exposing this could lead to mass firings, and some sort of system to ensure real accountability.

It's a problem, though, because there's no simple metric to determine whether patent examiners are doing a good job. Using number of patents reviewed as that metric encourages examiners to do a shoddy job actually examining the patents (i.e. what has actually been happening). If they are expected to pass only a certain fraction of patents, this is slightly better since it forces them to actually come up with reasons to reject some patents, but what fraction should they use? Two examiners doing perfect jobs may have very different fractions of accepted patents simply because one got better patents to review than the other, especially if they have different focus areas. Does the patent office even know the fraction of submitted patents in various areas which are good? A better metric would be whether accepted patents survive in the courts, but this depends on somebody actually challenging the patents and takes years after the fact. It might help now throw out some of the patent examiners who clearly haven't been doing their jobs in the past.

I'm not sure what the right solution is. Blind peer review and multiple review? Assign each patent to 2 or 3 different reviewers and call to carpet the ones who most consistently differ from others? Does that even work if half your patent examiners are shirking?

About 4 or 5 years ago, all the broadcast TV in the US changed over to a digital format, and the digital format includes HDTV broadcasts. If you have an HDTV and an antenna, and you live in a place where you can receive the signals, you can get the HDTV of all the broadcast networks over the air (OTA) with no cable.

It has been reported that Comcast re-compresses the digital HDTV streams, cramming them into a smaller digital channel in their cable system, in order to fit more channels in. This leads to reduced quality in the picture you view on Comcast compared to the OTA HDTV broadcast. I don't know about other cable systems. Here is one such report, though it seems to be specifically about other non-OTA HD channels (where the FIOS broadcast was used for comparison).