I don't doubt that a lot of cyber-spying is going on, but also note that Clarke is now CEO of Good Harbor Consulting, which coincidentally makes a boatload of money dong Cyber consulting. The more frenzy he whips up, the more money he rakes in.

Hmmm... With some restrictions, the US Department of Defense has approved use of Android and not IOS: http://www.bgr.com/2011/12/28/pentagon-approves-android-device-for-department-of-defense-apple-still-awaits-clearance/

Care for a $5,000 Ethernet cable? AudioQuest will be glad to sell you one of those too. Or maybe you'll spring for the $42,000 speaker cables? Fill your shopping cart using the handy price list found here: http://www.audioquest.com/pdfs/AQ-Retail-PB-2011-NOV-220d.pdf

How about every time the courts throw out a patent, the patent office sees its budget reduced by the amount of money spent by the lawyers on both sides to get that decision made? Maybe that's just a drop-in-the-bucket, but perhaps it would make the Patent office think twice about granting clearly weak or overly-broad patents and letting the court system decide the validity of said-patent.

Maybe. But the cynical economist in me sees danger. Bureaucracies, just like people, will act in their own best interest. if the Patent office becomes funded by their customers (the patent filers), then the Patent office has every incentive to make those customers happy so they'll come back for more, pay more fees and increase the budget of the Patent office. If the Patent office cracks down on weak or overly-broad patents, then their customers will be discouraged from filing more patents, and the Patent office will see a reduced budget. The incentives are all wrong.

Sounds like a disaster in-making to me. What if the Sheriff's office got to keep all the funds that it confiscated? No doubt there'd be a lot more arrests and confiscated funds. Same with the patent office. The Patent office will just issue more and more and more patents as it's now in their best interest. "Come one, come all, file your patents, On sale this week only!"

Reminds me of the one my brother built here except my brother's computer runs Minux.

That's the intent of the law. But what if Susie's mother embeds that movie on her own web page for all her friends to see? And what if Susie's mom has a few Google Ads on that web page (private financial gain)? And then, for whatever reason that these things happen, Susie's cute video goes viral, Mom's web page gets hundreds of thousands of hits, and those ads get clicked on generating a few thousand dollars? Well guess what? Mom is now a potential felon.

There's a good discussion of the issue below. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110609/23171814649/people-realizing-new-anti-streaming-criminal-copyright-bill-could-mean-jail-time-lip-synchers.shtml As usual, the broad language of a bill like this creates the possibility of many unintended consequences. Here's my comment from that discussion:

OK, say a mother is recording her kid's fifth birthday party along with the whole gang singing "Happy Birthday to You!". A mishap occurs that makes it particularly funny, so the uploaded YouTube video goes viral and her personal web page with the embedded movie gets a lot of hits and ad impressions.

Doesn't sound too far-fetched huh? Oops, the song "Happy Birthday to You" is under copyright protection. Looks like Momma is heading to the Big House for a five-year stint. Don't worry, she'll be out just in time for junior's 10th!