I agree with your point that the scale on the poll is pretty bogus as it amounts to 3 options staying at home, stating in the same metropolitan area, and travelling to another city. The differentiation seems pretty useless and the failure to distinguish between staying in the country or continent and travelling to the other side of the world is disappointing.

But to be fair, here are some examples on the east coast of the USA of cities that fall within the range. These numbers are the first result for directions on Google Maps, so the cities may be a bit closer if you consider actual distance instead of shortest driving directions:

Baltimore <-> Washington, D.C: 41 miles
Boston <-> Providence: 50 miles
Providence <-> Hartford: 87 miles
NYC <-> Philadelphia: 96.3 miles
Philadelphia <-> Baltimore: 101 miles
Boston <-> Hartford: 102 miles

If I were designing a security system for TSA, I would definitely consider printing a (possibly fake) screening status in the barcode in plain text. If you keep a database of what status you assigned to which boarding ticket, then you can more thoroughly screen (or arrest and jail indefinitely) anyone who changes the easily hackable obvious screening status on their boarding pass. This is much like a honeypot that folks sometimes use in network security. (For those who don't know, a honeypot is an easily hackable machine that serves no purpose except to be hacked so that an observer can find folks who are trying to break in.)

IANAL. One might argue that he qualifies under section (iv) on the basis that a pen and paper constitutes a 'recording device'. One might further argue that he qualifies under section (v) on the basis that converting his paper notes into electronic text constituted a transcription of the aforementioned recording. I think this is clearly nonsense and not the intent of the law, as these appear to be intended to cover those people employed by the court to perform these roles and not some individual who happened to engage in these practices while playing a role not on the list. I'd also note that (vi) explicitly limits itself to attorneys for the government and fails to gag attorneys for the witnesses. If note taking and posting is found to be illegal, perhaps we'll see a rise in demand for attorneys with eidetic memories.

I would think the IP addresses would be useless forever. It would likely take way more effort than it is worth to get them unblocked. Even if the court lifted the block, it would be hard to guarantee that they had been unblocked by every ISP out there. If this goes into overdrive, we might have a new compelling reason to switch to IPv6 as larger and larger swaths of IPv4 addresses become dead.

Agreed! The display is very important. I do not understand why the other commenters seems to be asking for a 1920x1080 display. This wide screen is good for watching movies, but crap for development work. I need more verticle screen real estate so that I can see a larger block of code at once. Verticle space is far more valuable than horizontal. I would gladly take a 1600x1200 display over a 1920x1080. If they really want to be innovative, they'll put a 1920x1200 display on the laptop along with a feature where it can be rotated vertical to give me 1200x1920. That's what I do on my desktop and it works great. Duplicate it on my laptop and I'll finally be able to use it for work purposes.

Sleeping is my most productive activity!

Typically compulsory licensing requirements include that the price must be fair. No reasonably human being (and likely no court) would feel that $1 billion dollars per thermostat is a fair licensing price when Honeywell is selling their thermostats for $50-$100 each. Presumably they'd have to sell their thermostats at $1b+ to claim that the patents were worth $1b per unit and seems likely that Honeywell would find themselves out of business pretty quickly if they demanded $1b+ per thermostat.

I had no idea these Nest Thermostats existed, but they look awesome. Now that I know about them I can go out and buy one and enjoy an increased quality of life. Thanks, Honeywell, for bringing them to my attention!

Be my guest. I'm fully in favor of the free flow of ideas, especially those that help to educate people.

DNS is a lot like a phone book, which is something many people understand. If we blacklist someone from DNS it's like removing them from the phone book. Their phone number still works and anyone can call them. Removing an illicit phone number from the phone book will not prevent people from dialing the number. A phone number would still be passed around in forums, between friends, etc.

Regularly removing phone numbers from the phone book may create many alternative phone books which is likely to create a big headache for all users in figuring out which phone book they need to use to find a particular website and in figuring out which phone books contain legitimate information and which ones will give you the real phone number for your bank and which ones will give you fake books. This is particularly concerning because the legislation proposed doesn't apply due process to removing a phone number from the phone book, but instead allows for arbitrary removals.

Is this DARPA's real motive or do they want the ability to cannibalize enemy satellites?

I think what he's trying to say is that they're now accepting payment in Lattes. I intend to take advantage of this new feature and send them a Latte or two every month rather than paying with my credit card.

Seems like you should weigh the pros and cons of selling it on the open market. Depending on the portion of the company owned, you may well be better off threatening to donate it to some entity that they would not want owning a portion of the company, such as a competitor.

The right answer is to use encryption on all websites. Unfortunately we're not yet at a point where all websites can be bothered to support encryption which means that we should use encryption for every website that supports it and carefully consider whether websites that don't support it are worth the risk. It would be nice if your web-browser would automatically use encryption on sites where it is available and, thanks to the EFF, there is a Firefox plug-in that does just that. Consider giving HTTPS Everywhere a try.

I agree, these are interesting questions. You propose some interesting analogies and the conclusions of them are hard to argue with. There is, however, a subtle point that gets lost in these analogies; Apple is the only publisher or merchant. Would your conclusions hold weight if a publisher refused to publish books with advertisements in them and they were the only entity that could publish books? Or what if they refused to sell clothing with advertising on it while being the only seller of clothing? I believe that in either of these cases the answer is no, if one publisher had a monopoly on the ability to publish books or one clothing store had a monopoly on selling clothes, that it would be unreasonable for them to regulate what books can be published or what clothing can be sold based on their own arbitrary opinions.

Unfortunately the waters are murkier than this. Apple has a monopoly on publishing apps for the iP* platform (iPhone, iPod, iPad), but other companies make similar platforms. Is it ok for one company to have a monopoly on (and use it to restrict) publishing for a particular platform when other competing platforms are available? After all, one could buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone and thus avoid Apple's restrictions. Is that good enough or does the market for each individual platform need to be free? I'm not sure how this might map into your above examples. The closest I can come is one merchant having a monopoly on cotton shirts while wool and polyester shirts are available from others, but that fails to capture the way you choose one platform and are locked into it for two years.