"Anonymous source claims" ...

That anonymous source guy is a nutcase. Imonths nonymous source the same guy who says Obama is a space alien?

On the other hand, in 2008 Mr. Source said "you think 2% growth for six monthd is a bad economy? Just wait and see how Obama trashes the economy for six years", so I guess he's right sometimes.

I very much care what it costs me, so TCO is one of the most important measurements of all.

> I have a used halfbrick here. It costs 99% less to buy (excluding shipping) and uses 0% of the power. The TCO is vastly better than either of the two options you present.

So the scorecard reads:

Item Effective Fast TCO

hw1 yes yes 6
hw2 yes yes 2
brick no na 0

It looks to me like "brick" loses because it can't do the job. The other two options are the same, except hw1 costs three times as much.
They can both do the job, and both can do it fast. The only difference is that the TCO is a lot lower on hw2, so it's the best choice.

> TCO is a meaningless measure and it's sad that it persists.

What your brick example shows is that TCO is not the ONLY consideration. "Can it do the job?" is also a critical consideration.
Amazingly, when making decisions you can actually consider more than one factor. You can look at both effectiveness AND cost.

> We've had all of that in software since fucking Windows 98 on an Evergreen overdrive (180 MHz) chip.

So every processor since then is useless?

> "A database designed for the many cores could work well."

> As we've had for the past 30+ years I've been alive?

So noone will ever use another database, and there is no longer any use for hardware to run databases on?

If you're getting that from the textbook first sale case, read the opinion you think you're citing. The ruling was that selling a book you've bought is neither copyright infringement nor theft.

On the other hand:

In Metro-Goldwyn Mayer v. Grokster, Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Stevens and OConnor, said, "deliberate unlawful copying is no less an unlawful taking of property than garden-variety theft."

That's just the most recent time they said copyright
infringement is stealing just as much as any other form of stealing. Seriously, the best way to convince yourself that you're not a thief is to stop stealing.

"If someone designs things and makes a living selling those designs ..."
Guess what. When you take away someone's livelihood, you're taking something from them.

Stealing my car would damage me much less than stealing my life's work, the things I've spent years authoring. I understand you want "free" stuff, so you try hard to convince yourself you're not really stealing. The thing is, at some level you not only know that what you're doing in theft, you know what that makes you - a thief. That may be why you're a sarcastic jackass - because knowing that you're a thief puts a man in a bad mood. When you stop being a thief, life is far more pleasant, because you know you really are who you wish to be.

I think 90% of what you said is right. The problem, I think, is the assertion that "lawyer & investor" is a nicer way of saying "patent troll". Sometimes that's a euphemism, sometimes it's not.

"Dancer" sometimes means "stripper" often means "hooker". But not always. I have a friend who is a professional dancer. She is not a stripper. She even dances with a pole, yet she doesn't take off her clothes.

I learned the other day that more than half of all patent suits are filed by just 16 NPEs. vThere are millions of investors. Hundreds of thousands of people and companies have patents. All of them put together don't file as many patent suits as those 16 trolls. So those trolls behave entirely differently from the other thousands of patent holders. Those few trolls are the problem.

By the way they don't only troll patents that can be represented in software. They troll hardware patents, business process patents, and design patents. One of them even trolled a patent on rectangles! :). Rounded corners teach us that the problem isn't "software" patents. The problems are a) bad patents and mainly b) patent trolls. take care of those 16 patent trolls and you're reduce patent suits by 64%. Not all investor lawyers are trolls. 16 of them are and those 16 need to be dealt with.

To take this one example suppose the ARM processor can do face recognition of a certain quality on a photo. Suppose it takes 1/4 of a second to process the image with some level reliability. Since this device can process 64 frames simultaneously, it can do the same recognition on video that the ARM could do on a photo.

With 64 cores, I'd say it's already a cluster. A dozen of these ($1200) would have 768 cores and fit in a microatx case. :)

It has about half the gigaflops of a Core i7, and costs 80% less to buy.
It uses 5-10 watts, whereas the Core i7 uses 100 - 200 watts, with the chipset.
So total cost of ownership is about 90% less than the Core i7. Ten of them would spank the heck out of a Core i7 and cost the same.

> and what can you run on it ?

16 or 64 cores is good for facial recognition, audio processing, video processing, some network stuff - things where you run the same function on many pixels / samples / rows. So for face recognition, for example, the image would be broken up into 64 blocks and all of the blocks analyzed simultaneously on the 64 cores.
A database designed for the many cores could work well. For example, say you need to sort a table with 100,000 rows. On a system like this with 64 cores,
each core could simultaneously sort a group of 1,500 rows, then you'd merge those 64 sorted groups together ala merge sort. As a firewall, it could handle a blacklist with a million entries, as each core would handle simultaneously apply 1/64 of that list.

> If I inherit a sculpture from my grandfather, can I sell it?

Yes, that's not commercial production of the sculpture. You know the difference between a garage sale and a factory.
What makes you think judges don't? Note you can sell a book in your garage sale too, there's nothing new here.

> If someone gives me a sculpture, can I put it on the shelf behind the counter in my shop?

Again, of course, nothing new here. Unless of course you agree not to put it up for public display.
Then your question becomes "can I make a contract agreeing to do something, then disregard my agreement?"

> It's ridiculous, and I don't think that a judge would uphold that a licence on a design could restrict use of the physical object that that design describes.

The binary code on a DVD describes pictures on a screen. "Licensed for private home exhibition only ..."

> So what? the printer maker should apologize for not having understood the author of the design and make a deal. If they DID
> understand the author and worked around his wish, they should apologize louder. Failure to comply with the above has repercussion
> in MY opinion of such a company, I don't want to be their customer.

Indeed. Working out disagreements in a respectful, humble way is a sign of being what's called a "grown up".
"I'm sorry I offended you" is a sentence we should all use often, right along with "how can I help?"

> But a license is _not_ a contract (not in US law; it may be in other places but there usually all the other laws are different as well).

I suspect you're thinking of a EULA hidden inside the box, which the customer can't read, and therefore can't agree to, before purchasing the boxed software.
Since the buyer didn't agree to the contract prior to purchase, it's unenforcable.

> A license is something that gives you certain rights that you wouldn't have without a license.

Something that gives you certain rights is also a contract, in many cases. More specifically, a contract is something that gives you certain rights, in exchange for something, which you accept, on purpose. So a license is also a contract if a) it imposes some condition on the recipient, b) is accepted by the recipient and c) both parties intend to "strike a deal", to get the advantages offered by the license contract.

The elements of a contract, in simplest terms:
person A: I'll do X (or let you do X) if you do Y.
person B: Okay, I agree, I'll do Y.

A contract that is also a license:
person A: I'll give you a right to copy my work, if you refrain from commercial use. (Creative commons license, non-commercial)
person B: Clicks "I agree to the license"

The only questionable part is whether person B, in agreeing to the CCL, agreed not to render the design for commercial purposes.
They may have meant that they agreed not to sell the design itself. Clear wording in the license will fix that.

In a specific case, there may be emails where the licensee said they understood the license agreement to mean they couldn't
use the design, including printed copies, for commercial purposes. If so, they are in violation of the agreement. They made a
deal, they understood the deal they made, and they violated the deal.

> But a license is _not_ a contract (not in US law; it may be in other places but there usually all the other laws are different as well).

I suspect you're thinking of a EULA hidden inside the box, which the customer can't read, and therefore can't agree to, before purchasing the boxed software.
Since the buyer didn't agree to the contract prior to purchase, it's unenforcable.

> A license is something that gives you certain rights that you wouldn't have without a license.

Something tat gives you certain rights is also a contract, in most cases. More specifically, a contract is something that gives you certain rights, in exchange for something, which you accept, on purpose. So a license is also a contract if a) it imposes some condition on the recipient, b) is accepted by the recipient and c) both parties intend to "strike a deal", to get the advantages offered by the license contract.

The elements of a contract, in simplest terms:
person A: I'll do X (or let you do X) if you do Y.
person B: Okay, I agree, I'll do Y.

A contract that is also a license:
person A: I'll give you a right to copy my work, if you refrain from commercial use. (Creative commons license, non-commercial)
person B: Clicks "I agree to the license"

The only questionable part is whether person B, in agreeing to the CCL, agreed not to render the design for commercial purposes.
They may have meant that they agreed not to sell the design itself. Clear wording in the license will fix that.

In a specific case, there may be emails where the licensee said they understood the license agreement to mean they couldn't
use the design, including printed copies, for commercial purposes. If so, they are in violation of the agreement. They made a
deal, they understood the deal they made, and they violated the deal.

That would work, if the judge were a complete moron. More like:

Fred and Jim select a design, looking under the category "CCL - not for commercial use".
Fred and Jim render it.
Fred and Jim knowingly use it for commercial use, in violation of the license they voluntarily agreed to.
Fred and Jim insult the judge's intelligence claiming that neither Jim nor Fred had any idea what the other was doing.
Fred and Jim end up paying treble damages.

You said "easy to circumvent". It's generally not a good idea to try to "circumvent" the law.
That only changes you from a law-breaker to a smartass law-breaker.

No, it's called copy right because because it's the right to make a copy. It has zip to do with giving or recieving. You'll notice that "RIAA like bullshit" gets you busted in court because that's the law of the land and has been for centuries. That was law before the phrase "copy right" was used as a shorthand term for it.

You might not LIKE the law, but that's the law. If you don't like it, go back and talk to Queen Elizabeth.