Why was there "no prior art" if Rambus simply took the JEDEC committee's ideas and created patenst? There should be VOLUMES of prior art from the JEDEC meeting minutes to people's scribbles in their notepads. You're seriously telling me that Rambus was the only company attending the meetings to take notes? And they managed to get their patents ramrodded through before anyone on the JEDEC committee decided to take their first note? Ya, no.

No, what happened is Rambus has the patents already applied for. They then influenced the standards committee to use the patented items without telling them of the patent applications.

It's not a case of Rambus patenting what was discussed in secret. It's a case of Rambus intentionally steering towards the use of patented things without notifying them (per requirements of the committee) of that pending patent application.

And that's where the "wrongness" comes in - Rambus knew that they were intentionally deceiving the standards committee into using patented technology that they did not disclose.

Standards committees using patents are fine. It's when the participants intentionally mislead the committee into choosing technology that's patented without disclosing the fact that gets everyone twisted up.

Unless you were recently dealing with a repair requiring that size drive, the mistake could have been more complicated. Hard drives did not always use 1000 as incements for size. Originally, before creative marketing took advantage of SI units, the drives were measured by actual data capacity. Perhaps your purchase was a transition period and the owner was looking at the CHS to determine the data size verses the marketed size.

I know at the time they changed how the claimed size was created a lot of confusion. My toshiba laptop with its enormous for the time 2.1 gig harddrive was actually a smaller drive using compresion to be reported as larger. Toshiba ended up replacing the drive in 1997 or so because someone was suing them. But i only found out because the CD rom needed waranty repair.

For all intents and purposes, the switch to SI happened way back in the 80s when IDE first came out and you didn't have to go enter in bad sector lists into the BIOS anymore. Heck, you probably can remember shopping for hard drives and looking at the bad sector list to find one with the least number of them.

Of course, in those days the capacity probably included using the bad sectors as well.

But the use of SI units has been around forever, when even just writing the number of bytes out was doable. (I still remember the WD press release when they announced IDE).

And I recall plenty of ads that stated "1MB = 1 Million Bytes" back in the way early 90s.

Of course, this cheat is somewhat handy for SSDs where you cannot use every byte because of FTL and other overheads in the system (including 2% bad block when new overhead - yes, up to 2% of flash can be bad from the get-go - so that 128GiB flash can have 2.5GiB in bad blocks).

Anyhow, I've had this situation happen to me - a store I frequented accidentally sent me an item I didn't order. They offered to refund me for shipping, or I could buy it at a step discount (this was like a $130 item, they offered to sell it to me for $55. Or I could send it back.). Now, I know it wasn't a scam since I dealt with the store before (and they have superb customer service), and the guy even admitted that after the costs of return shipping, $55 was about all he could hope to recover in the end. I just bought it - $55 for a $130 item including free shipping? That was a steal (and I was eyeing the item anyhow, being offered to me discounted, free shipping and in my hand now? Icing).

And I know of other stores that did the same thing - they shipped us too much of a USB3.0 card, and said we could keep it - it was a $20 item and not work the whole RMA and return shipping thing.

Of course, I was dealing with well trusted stores.

Heck, Amazon did it to me too - they switched to a new shipper and who misdelivered it. Amazon shipped a replacement and a week later, the misdelivered item arrived. I called Amazon up, they sent me a return label and everything. I went and shipped it back. When I noticed they accidentally credited my account, I called them about it - they were so kind they removed the partial credit (Amazon charged $6 for shipping -taken out of the refund), and I then realized I got the items for free. I called them back and told them, and the customer service just shrugged - they really didn't have the power to fix it, and the costs to do it all would probably have exceeded the item cost (around $40). And yes, I admitted to them I wanted to be honest and pay for the stuff I got (it was their mistake, after all).

In the end, I got free stuff, deeply discounted stuff, and a clear conscience knowing that I at least tried and got permission. Free stuff is nice. Free stuff legally acquired? Even better. And companies that know their business well know when to cut losses and when to pursue.

Zavvi has a right to ask for the product back - the problem here is using the "nuke" option instead of the "diplomacy" option. After all, instead of the letter threatening action, they could send an informative letter first - perhaps saying the item was shipped in error, and that the customer could buy it at a steep discount or return it with an enclosed shipping label - just stuff it back in the original shipping box, and paste the shipping label on top (heck, they make small packs of tape so you can seal the box without using your own tape!) and call the shipper to pick up the item. And sometimes even eating a small loss doesn't hurt as well - for using either option, since it was a $20 game, just refund that money as well. Those who don't send it back? Then pursue them legally - give the customer a chance to be honest and let them benefit more by doing the right thing - either by getting the item they ordered free and a discounted Vita, or free item and a returned Vita. Either way, you overcompensate the customer, they feel good, and are generally more than likely to do the right thing immediately. The company's already out the cost of shipping, and the RMA will cost them some more (what happens if the Vita was opened?).

Hell, even Logitech doesn't do RMA all the time - the costs (shipping, RMA manpower, etc) can easily outweigh the cost of the item, so they just ship out a brand new product as a replacement, or demand return of a small item of the original product - cheaper for them.

Oooooooops, I accidentally implied that methane caused that. That makes me look really dumb. Please be aware that this was just poor communication, not poor understanding.

Fracking wells here in the U.S. have similar leakage rates. Methane is bad news, and a huge chunk of pre-life fireball era earth's atmosphere was methane.

Sure, lots of things have a stronger absorption profile than CO2, CH4 is one, but if it even has a hundred thousandth of the emission levels of carbon dioxide, I'd be pretty surprised.

Still: fix the easy things first.

It's weird to me how Obama does all sorts of terrible things(most of which aren't new, but that's no excuse), but his primary antagonists seem to always be presenting the most discredited or irrelevant nonsense as defining evidence of his totalitarianism.

If you run 20 bullshit double blind experiments, 10 of them are going to show positive correlation to the hypothesis, and 1 will show improbably high correlation. Far more still if your testers have any unconscious control over the data.

Perhaps more importantly, given the areas of strength and weakness in the Soviet economy, what resources did it get them to waste?

Team USSR could probably afforded to have the million conscripts who scored lowest on physical fitness staring at playing cards and trying to develop psychic powers through sheer force of will for years without much trouble. Something that consumed a resource that needed to be imported in exchange for hard currency, though, or a project that represented a nontrivial slice of domestic productivity? That was a race that they weren't able to win even with regard to real weapons, so any nonsense they could be conned into would just make things even harder for them.

We cannot permit an imaginary weapons gap!

I have nothing against Lockheed's engineering prowess. My point is that the major claim to novelty of the 'OMG Private Space Exploration!!!' proponents has been that exciting, new, innovative, start-up technology would be crazy cheap compared to the 'We are the smiley civilian face of the ICBMs and deep, deep, pockets side of the DoD' style of space travel.

Lockheed is a lot of things; but crazy cheap is not one of them.

Seeing a private-space-startup start buying from Lockheed is sort of like seeing a web or 'cloud' startup start buying mainframes from IBM. It's not that IBM is a bad company, or that their mainframes don't have superb records for uptime, reliability, and capability for certain workloads, it's that that's a good indicator that they aren't having the luck they hoped for in using innovative new techniques to render obsolete the old, reliable, and stratospherically expensive gear that they were attempting to disrupt...

Somebody should really just tamper with the instruments on the ground. We all know that Mission Control is going to rerout the power to the secondary flux controller at the last moment; but they are waiting for the big bank of intimidating gauges and colored lights to show that only moments remain. We could save a lot of time by installing a 'false indication of crisis' feature to spur them to action ahead of time.

It's the scary kind of 'routine', since cooling failure (on a spacecraft that gets a pretty good dose of solar radiation and has no atmosphere for cooling purposes) will definitely render the station incompatible with human life in fairly short order, possibly even get it toasty enough to destroy some of the less robust hardware; but, unfortunately, pumped coolant loops running in space are kind of touchy. Pity that Peltiers are so miserably inefficient and power hungry...

As it happens, the US and Russians used pencils at first; but concluded that unpredictable addition of conductive graphite dust to the closed interiors of expensive, accident-prone aerospace hardware was a bad plan.

The Russians used grease pencils as a substitute for a while, since the binder keeps the pigment from floating around, and NASA took Fisher up on their offer to test some of their fancy new pressurized pens, which they eventually adopted (as did the Russians).

Other beliefs and opinions often have at least some rational basis and are subject to debate, religion does not.

That's utter nonsense. I'd say *most* politicians hold *numerous* beliefs that are not based on any evidence, and they are unwilling to debate or reconsider.

religion is directly responsible for much death and suffering throughout history, even into the present day. Other beliefs and opinions have nowhere near that death toll.

That's a pretty stupid thing to say. I'm pretty sure the combined death tolls of Stalin and Mao outweigh the sum total of all religious conflicts in modern history.

Regardless of whether votes ultimately fall along religious lines, we wouldn't even be wasting time on these issues if it weren't for religion.

That makes no sense at all. If religion is to blame, why can't you show a clear breakdown of votes by affiliation? How could it be otherwise?

And name ANY issue you want, that you wish to attribute to religion, and I'm sure I can point to a rather non-religious country somewhere on the planet that similarly has laws against it.

Even if you're British or Canadian where the religious right isn't nearly as rabid as they are in the U.S., they still influence legislation to the nation's detriment.

Thank you for calling the US "rabid" and "religious right". Now I will point out that homosexual marriage was legal in the US before almost any other nation on earth. Only the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada beat the US by a year or two. The undeniably secular and oh-so-enlightened England was a downright laggard on this issue. Why weren't they advancing LGBT rights a century before the knuckle-dragging US with their "rabid", "religious right" population?

How can Rambus now 'licence' dead patents? Surely now the company must be wound up and consigned to the trash can of history.

Actually, it is in trouble these days - neither the PS4 nor the Xbone use RDRAM anymore. Before that, Rambus made a ton of money for RDRAM inside the PS2 (the best selling console in the world, period) and XDR-DRAM in the PS3.

But now the PS4 uses GDDR5, and the Xbone uses regular DDR3.