This isn't the first time I have seen this suggestion, but to me, its the most sensible solution to the present patent fiasco. Because something better WILL come along, and sales of the old stuff will dwindle. When it costs 50% of the profits to register it for another year, just let it expire. That could be a bookkeeping problem because there would have to be very strictly applied rules forbidding the transfer of another products profits into the book for this one, and as usual, loopholes would be bought, and bookkeepers able to hide such creative accounting would have to be figured into the P&L statement FOR that product.

By and large I think its a good idea, but as usual, the devil will be in the details. Stuff like this, since its usually written by lawyers we've elected, is guaranteed to look good on the front page of the daily fish wrap, and is also guaranteed to have loopholes that are for sale to the highest bidder in the campaign finance wars.

As for software, no patents, copyrights only, and to encourage innovation, and even 5 years is excessive IMO. And for $DEITIES sake, go back to registered copyrights so there is actually a computer searchable database allowing one to search for previous copyrights that might cover this amazing little 5 line code snippet you dreamed about last night. But do not quote the copyrighted material as a return, only the owners contact details and its registration number. Hopefully, this would encourage private exchanges between the individuals to determine if your little magic incantation is infringing or not.

But since that would put lawyers into the soup lines all over, we'll never see such an idea promulgated anyplace but /. If it came to be, I'd have reason to be happy, but at my age, it cannot even be wishful thinking, not enough time left since I expect it will take at least another 25 years for the idea to mature into actual practice. That would make my diabetic body over 100. Not bloody likely as the Brits would say.

Cheers, Gene

That to me is the 64 million dollar question. And likely one that we will never ever get a truthful answer to. There is too much at stake in the marketing of HFCS to ever let an FDA regulation even attempt to control it, or any pollutants it may carry.

As for the linkage between CCD and HFCS that has been treated with this insecticide, it makes just as much sense to me as any one of the other theories, and more sense than most of them.

In the meantime, over 20% of the population that has been sucking this shit up in a many a day sugary pop habits, are now type 2 diabetic, with projections being made that at the presently rising rate, 50% of the population will be by 2030. In case you missed it, we went ape shit over polio before it got to 10% of the kids, and it was called an epidemic then.

Only the entrenched agribusinesses intent on selling all this sugar have now apparently bought, or threatened with billion dollar legal actions, anyone who knows how to spell "epidemic".

I'm in that type 2 group, forced to limit my intake of damned near anything with starches in it because it is instant sugar when digested. That means no white breads, no potato's, damned little fruit because its naturally sweet, leaving the meats as low sugar foods, or fish as a no sugar food. So you have a sweet tooth, you go buy the "sugar free" crap that has 22 grams of "sugar alcohols" in it, thinking it really is sugar free. First off, that crap ain't an alcohol, and second its worth about half those grams in effective sugar, third off, it, like the left handed fats in some of those potato chips, gives you a good case of the trots that won't stop until you are cleaned out. Not a bit pleasant and often quite painful.

Anybody who claims sugar, in whatever form, is not a poison in the quantities we now consume because its everywhere, is a future type 2 diabetic, so enjoy it while you can. When you can't, and the circulation in your feet gets so poor you literally can't go out when the temps are below 65F, or even worse they start dying and have to be amputated to stop the gangrene, come back to me then (if I'm still around, I'm 77 now and could have a diabetic effects related heart attack before I can hit send) and claim sugar isn't a poison. In the meantime the deniers really ought to STFU, you have not experienced it, so it, to you, doesn't exist. That's your problem, I can testify it is very real.

Hell, for all I know, maybe its population control, just a hell of a lot more subtle than the famines & wars in Africa. Slower action, like cooking the frog I guess.

Cheers, Gene

I think all the posts so far have missed the point entirely.

To me, anyone who targets a child's natural curiosity for that sort of exploitation is demonstrating just how badly the planets gene pool filters need cleaning.

If, in the governments collective wisdom (now there is an oxymoron for you), they would re-instate the days when the post office posters said "wanted, dead or alive", which encouraged the bounty hunters to bring em back draped over a saddle, I think I might be interested in making a little extra money to supplement my meager SS check.

To exploit a child in that manner ought to be subject to capital punishment.

Gene pool filter cleaning as it were. Removing the genes that think like that, has to be good for the race as a whole.

Cheers, Gene
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to
change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.

I've got this horrible feeling it will pass with a veto proof majority. These folks simply, and only, understand one thing and that is how much who paid for a vote one way or the other.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Well, if its on the agenda, they eventually need to do something with it. If they bring it up and it fails then they have done their job. If they bring it up and it passes it must be the will of the people (who wrote all those checks of course, nothing to do with constituent email blasting it)

Which they will have coming, so I have -zero or less sympathy, and they'll be so busy gloating over it they won't pay attention to anything but the box being down 50% because people are pissed, so they clamor for even more draconian measures until you can't legally take a picture of your grand children and email them to their Aunt Tillie.

The only way I see that is good for our so-called "government" is to copy out and print that list of who got how much from the link at the head of this thread, and if you live where you can vote in their district, vote for anyone else BUT them. Fortunately for them, none of the 3 reps nor the 2 senators that I get to vote for, are listed as having been enriched by this scheme.

Don't you wish it would be that quiet? I recommend the purchase of some decent shooting muffs, and as always, keep the faith and your powder dry. You will likely need both...

Cheers, Gene
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)

No, I don't think they "have a very good understanding of technology"

Many moons ago, when I setup my first NATed local network here, I bought a Siemans router. I set it up with a 12 character PW for admin purposes, the maximum it would allow. It was rooted and bricked 3 days later. If it was that easily attacked, I sure as hell didn't want it and took it back to Circuit City. They agreed, and weren't surprised that it came back.

So I next brought home a Linksys BESFR41, which in a pinch I can still use. But it was eventually replaced with dd-wrt running on an old x86 box, whose radio never worked despite registering it, so now I have a netgear something or other whose radio used wpa2 with about a 120 char passphrase, and Just Works(TM).

Maybe things have changed in the last decade, but I personally don't use the word Siemans and technology in the same sentence.

Now, for the person who used Bumfuck, Utah as an example, what makes you think they would have anything more sophisticated than a pressure switch, adjusted for the height of the water storage tank, to control their water pumps?

Sheesh, that ain't high tech, needing a computerized system to run it. The town clerk probably goes around reading the meters & sending out the bills on an old pentium powered box running winderz 3.1 from floppies, likely without any connection except the printers parport cable.

So Bumfuck, Utah's water supply is not subject to a terrorists attack via this here intertubes, and far safer than any bigger towns that is all "modern & computerized".

Cheers & a merry Christmas to all, Gene

I was doing great reading the article linked to, until I got to the part where the optical goodies are built to withstand 6 atmospheres or 20,000 feet of pressure.

'Scuse me, but according to my calculator, and knowing that 34 feet of water is one atmosphere, then 6 is a measly 204 feet. 20,000 feet would be, in slightly rounded figures, 600 atmospheres. And since the Med. Sea is salty, its safe to reduce that to 200 feet.

Its amazing that in all the posts to this story ahead of mine, no one has mentioned the missing word after the 6 "hundred".

Shame on you all, blathering away on stuff that if this is true, will have zip effect because it will fail spectacularly, both in terms of results per unit of money, and the scientific disappointment.

In terms of knowledge gained vs money spent, it certainly seems like its worthwhile to do. Doing it in the Med. also spans a much wider bit of the universe due to the planets rotation in comparison to ICECUBE, which is aimed more along the polar axis.

My unasked till now question though is: Is there enough daytime sunlight penetration at that depth in the Med. to represent a background noise level that will have to be subtracted, and how will this limit its ultimate sensitivity? Secondarily, what is the clarity of the water from the top of those 800 meter towers on down? Given that its sea water, with the detrious of life falling through it from the oxygenated surface layer 1000 feet above, there is zero chance in hell its not somewhat absorbtive of the emitted photons from a neutrino event.

My $0.02 (in 1934 dollars, adjust for inflation of 77 years)

Cheers, Gene

99% seems like a reasonable SWAG to me based on recent experience. I just went through 4 routers that were either defective out of the box, or not configurable enough to handle my little 4 or 5 machine home network, finally finding a Netgear WNR3500 that worked, including the radio. My new Nook Color needed a passphrase entry for WPA-2, and it Just Worked(TM) This included some $250 Cisco units that didn't work, or worked like a 2400 baud dialup modem for achieved speeds.

Every damned one of them is hard coded to DynDns. So they now have a liplock monopoly on the market. And they know it.

Cheers, Gene

Support? Not really, so that box is shut off forever at my 20.

It is not a non-story as you seem to imply. I too got caught with the change (but it was several months ago), having one name registered there. It died through no action on the monthly update update because I am now on a cable modem & the ip is assigned to the modem, never changes. dd-wrt didn't do the auto-update because it hadn't changed, so it expired. So now I've had to register again, but with a much longer hostname now that advertizes that its a free dyndns account. The did it with dd-wrt for me when combined with brainslayers refusal to reply to any messages sent regarding a registered dd-wrt install, so I went out and bought another router (another story all by itself, it was 5 each, 60 mile trips to where I could look at routers & read specs before I actually got one that could be configured to work) and this one is hard coded for dyndns.

I suspect that part of the foot dragging on the part of cisco/linksys/netgear is related to the protocols that other such providers use to maintain active accounts, and tracking them all would quickly make them use a bigger eprom, which in addition to having to write the code, a one time cost, but raises the hardware costs by 13 cents a unit, something the numbskull MBA's just won't accept.

I did run without a dns name for a while, which worked fine AFAIWC, but my sent email got filtered to the spam folder at a lot of the recipients sites because of the ip address contained in the sig where the name should have been. Damned if I do, and damned if I didn't. Since my site serves as a backup repo of a lot of software for a 25 year old computer, if it goes dark, that is just one more nail in the lid of that old & greatly loved machine.

Yeah, it is a story, and a PIMA too.

Cheers, Gene

"It wont be until the rest of us demand proper support any vendor will put the time and money into a proper solution"

Precisely. Here at the coyote.den, I've been NATing all my stuff to a 192.158.xx.xx scheme and will never ever use even the last block of 254 addresses fully. But that is whats forced on the home user because his ISP only gives us one address.

ALL of the existing, can be purchased from Amazon, reference books are both quite a few years old now, and damned expensive in dead tree formats, too damned expensive. Yes, you can get the e-book versions for a $20 bill, but Amazon won't sell it to you without the kindle itself logging in somehow. So they are not accessable without first dropping the card for the Kindle at $200 and up. That's bull shit but it won't grow any corn where I come from.

Amazon should make up their mind, either sell books, or Kindles but not both.

Then, figuring if I could buy the e-book I could read it with Calibre, but figured I had better check out the e-pub compatible reader (an Aluratek Libre!) that I bought the missus for Christmas last year (which supposedly came with a 1 year warranty that has about a week to run), I pulled it out and discovered it is deader than a 5 year old mouse. Plugged its charger in, no response. Plugged the charger into one of those universal usb powered read/write anything adapters, one that when plugged into a normal usb port, lights up the whole room with an erie blue light. Nothing, charger is dead.

Plug the reader into a usb port, which Aluratek claims can charge it in 8 hours. 16 hours later, still dead. Now, since I am a C.E.T., I open the thing up, a 3.7 volt battery reads 4.7 _millivolts_but even with power on the usb plug, no charging current is getting to the battery. So, it appears to me that the charger may have gone wild before it failed completely, and let the magic smoke out of the internal charge regulation parts, but very close inspection with a very high powered magnifying lens doesn't disclose anything that looks to be damaged, and a simple ohmmeter test of the transistors says they are good. I wrote Aluratek at their email support site asking, but of course its the weekend, and by the time a reply gets here, the warranty will be fini.

I might buy another, but the warranty had better read damned good before I drop the card.

Back to ipv6: The relatively elder age of the available books on the subject means they will cover only the RFC's for it, and likely zero content will actually address what, where & how we should attack the problem with our favorite editors, in my case vim.

So, the bottom line is this: Google needs to write an e-book documenting how it is actually done, and likely make it available in a non-drm'd format for a $20 bill. At that point, ipv6 might take off, perhaps at 1% of the ISP's in the next year.

Until such time as the implementation details are actually published at an affordable by Joe & Jill Lunchbucket price, google may well find they are virtually the only ones in this truly humungous ipv6 pond. The rest of us, ISP's included, will go about the daily business without worrying about it until the address crunch really happens. Since most ISP's have 3 to 20 times the address space assigned than they are actually using, TPTB simply cannot see any reason to spend even a $20 bill on ipv6. And at the end of the day, I see no real reason to call mine up and do anything more than ask when ipv6 services may become available. I did that shortly before that national test last summer, and got a "what's ipv6?" reply.

Anyway, since folks are saying it, so will I. That's my $0.02 on the subject. Adjust for inflation though, it only took $0.05 to buy a loaf of bread when I was born.

Cheers, Gene
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene>
Most people eat as though they were fattening themselves for market.
                                -- E.W. Howe