Most of the remaining MPEG LA patents that matter run out in Q1 2014. They have others, but most of them are on features added to MPEG-4 late, ones that aren't needed in a browser's decoder, such as interlace support and decoding of images with errors.

I used to have a Lotus Esprit, but no matter how hard I mashed the pedal, it would never smoke the tires. It would just go faster. It was so infuriating how it would just sprint away from the other vehicle instead of sitting there smoking the tires like the other vehicle.

And they do it by use of this tiger pebble, that keeps away tigers.

Nobody better touch my pagan festival for the "birth" of someone born in July, yet celebrated in December.

I don't see the point, since the encryption methods are probably also hacked, and we probably has OS libraries with whisper routines that just invoke built into our devices.

All the backdoors are wide open, and the front doors too. We live in Stasi Germany.

Arguably, in 1909.

Agreed. Kiva is one of the most blatant examples of "Machines should think, people should work". The intelligence in the system is in computers. All the humans do is reach into the bin the laser pointer points to, take out an item, wave it under a bar code scanner, and put it in the output bin which has a light on. It takes 15 minutes to learn the job (really, about 90 seconds, but you get a little faster with practice). There's no hope of promotion, and it's only a temporary job until the picking robots are developed.

Welcome to the future.

On the whole, since we literally are close to the tipping point that will make it incredibly expensive (as in ten to twenty times) to the GDP to deal with climate change events (storms, massive fluctuations like bizarre cold snaps, acidic oceans destroying shellfish, Antarctic ice sheet sliding off and raising sea level 2 meters worldwide, etc), this is a reasonable argument for short term thinking, given the massive increase in coal use in China and worldwide.

However, to do it safely, you would have to use either the Canadian or French model, where you have 1 or 2 plant types that are rolled out everywhere, not the US-based Each Plant Is Special And Different approach, to minimize accidents.

That said, you still need to actually reduce - not maintain - coal oil and even natural gas (all fossil fuels) use worldwide, especially in the EU, US, China, and India.

One way would be to not subsidize nuclear energy, but to remove all tax subsidies and exemptions for fossil fuels, charge market rate leases for public lands (seriously, 5 cents to mine an entire acre in a national park or at sea?), and use those funds to - at the same time - provide capital (not operating expenses or subsidies, just low cost loan capital) for renewable energies (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal).

Adapt or die.

Because climate change is now, and I hope you don't live close to a coast.

This should be very effective if it works. Which it should. Automated manufacturing usually takes a lot of startup time. Production lines have to be designed, fabricated, and carefully installed with everything aligned properly.

There's already a big success in this area - Kiva Systems. They make those little mobile robots used for order processing. Kiva already is handling about 20% of online orders, and Amazon bought the company recently. Setting up a warehouse for Kiva is simple - all you really need is a big flat floor. You put down markers for robot guidance, bring in the shelving units, the charging stations, and the human order-picking stations, which are all standard components, hook everything up to the servers, and go. No need to fabricate and install complex conveyor systems. No need for on-site robot repair techs - all the Kiva robots are interchangeable, so you have spares, and you can just send them back to Kiva HQ (which is small) for repairs.

All your privacy is belong to the 1960s and before.

Welcome to Serfdom.

They still exist, we just don't admit it.

Just like we don't admit we have civilian cargo ship drone packages on certain routes.

Drones are small, and easily deployed.

The problem with Amazon is flying them in US skies means people are going to sue you when you kill their kid or their pet when the drone drops the package or hits a crow and falls into something.

Well, no, at least, not the last bit.

My understanding is that the NSA is a pretty large organization and that it's involved in rather a lot of signals intelligence type operations. It's doubtful, in the majority of cases, that $RANDOM_NSA_EMPLOYEE is likely to be involved in the particular scandal of the day you want addressed.

I appreciate this view isn't going to be popular here, where most commenters seem to think that $RANDOM_NSA_EMPLOYEE is guaranteed to be directly involved in reading their emails, which they're obviously doing because they want to root out subversives and blackmail them, rather than because the NSA might, I dunno, be going overboard and doing illegitimate things for a legitimate cause (like tackling terrorism or even spying on rival governments.)

I'm pretty sure the author thinks non-renewables are horrible, and renewables are horrible and all human beings that use more energy or different energy than him are scum and should just keel over and die. Like 100% of humans, he is a self-righteous hypocrite who forgives his own indiscretions but casts scorn at anybody else's.

Having once written for HyperCard, I'm glad it's gone. It had some syntax in common with COBOL. ADD 1 TO N is valid COBOL and valid HyperTalk. The data access in Hypercard (put the second word of name into last_names) was worse than COBOL.

If you used card names instead of card numbers, the program ran much slower.