The only reason that they charge more right now is... because with only one provider in most areas, there is no competition and they can charge what ever the hell they like, because what are you going to do, not have internet access?

For privacy.

If I have sufficiently many users, it becomes quite possible (with reasonably simple-to-set-up systems) to make it virtually impossible to reconstruct any user's complete clickstream.

With each machine broadcasting a publicly accessible IP address that includes the full MAC address, it becomes trivial to permanently track the full clickstream of every user on my network -- and even to track that user's clickstream between all of the networks that they ever participate in, since the (publicly-broadcast) MAC will still be quasi-unique.

Clearly because then you would be destroying the perfect beauty of his internet.

What, by leaving the one and only ISP in the area?

Yeah, that'll work.

So wait, standard policy will be for all devices to be publicly accessible from the internet, with its *device-unique* IP Address exposing the HW (MAC) address of the device, with no ability to shield machines from publicly broadcasting their existence so that it becomes trivial to isolate each individual device's traffic, no ability to block this behavior, no ability to segment the network or have any devices that aren't publicly accessible.

This is better, how?

which means the very carefully hidden patents that mean you will be sued into oblivion as soon as everyone finished their roll-out still have 10 years left.

Fine. I take my $3 app (my cut: $2), and list it as "MSRP: $9.95". Amazon sells it for $3. I get $2.

All this does is encourage unreasonably high MSRP values. Maybe that's what amazon wants... that way they can list everything at 60-70% "discount" off of a fictional MSRP all the time.

Is there a reason you can't put a router with NAT behind the mifi?

Just what we need. Everybody deliberately voting for the biggest idiot on the other side instead of the best candidate on their side. That will definitely lead to a new era of intelligence in government policy.

Or you just make everybody so afraid of the terrists that they won't leave their homes^H^H^H^H^Hbunkers. Then there won't be anybody to drive the trucks.

With regard to the patents, he has nothing to negotiate. However, if he wrote the code, and released it under the GPL, he could definitely claim that their software which uses the technology is a violation of the terms of the GPL license. This claim might be legitimate (if they copied) or completely not legitimate (if they didn't re-use any of the code, and merely developed new software with similar capabilities and features).

In reality, OP is going nowhere with this. The USPTO is unlikely to invalidate the patent because somebody presents them with prior art that they already considered. Even if the USPTO was wrong, they aren't going to reconsider. Even if this was new prior art that nobody had previously known about... the USPTO is extremely unlikely to reconsider the patent grant. If it has been granted already, then, as they say, "prosecution on the merits is closed." Oh, sure, if IBM sues somebody, the prior art might be helpful. Claim 1 might or might not hold up unmodified in court, depending. Were it to require modification, then IBM could potentially lose a suit. IBM is unlikely to pursue the matter at this stage anyway, and they probably don't even realize that they have this particular patent.

I'm not going to read the entire document to make sure that I understand precisely all of IBM's definitions of terms, so I can't give an informed opinion on the validity. Without doing enough reading to be informed ('cause hey, this is the internet after all, I'm supposed to be wrong or at least uninformed), the whole thing probably turns on the feature of not having to re-link or even re-load the application to set the heap checking feature on and off.

Remember, you're only infringing a claim if you are infringing the entire claim. This patent isn't on "heap checking" or even "run-time detection of invalid heap access", or anything of the sort. If you aren't infringing the entirety of claim 1, the entirety of claim 12, or the entirety of claim 16 (the 3 independent claims), then you aren't infringing this patent. Similarly, if the HeapCheck software didn't do everything listed in those claims, then the differences between HeapCheck and those claims is the part that is (supposedly) novel and non-obvious.

(standard disclaimers apply; I'm no lawyer, this isn't legal advice, I'm just an engineer that happens to work the IP/patent process for my department)

I know, but guns scare people.

Everybody knows that a guy with a big ass gun is guaranteed to go on a killing spree. Just go watch any movie that has a guy with a big ass gun in it.

However, with sufficiently poor credit, it becomes impossible to even open a checking account.

OK, fine. Nobody raises prices. Instantly all products sell out, since everybody has enough money to buy everything they need, everything they want, and everything that they feel like buying because its just lying there. Only there isn't enough stuff in the whole world to fill everybody's needs, wants, and whims. So people start fighting over the last few items. Someone offers to pay double, then someone offers to pay double that, etc.

Because there needs to be some inherent balance between the availability of money and the availability of things to buy with it.

If suddenly there were zillions of dollars lying about, candy bars sold for only $1 apiece would sell out everywhere, and there'd be a huge shortage of candy bars until someone had the bright idea to charge more for them -- enough more that they could handle the demand.